What is ORCID?
ORCID is a free, unique, persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and links you to your work.
ORCID — short for Open Researcher and Contributor ID — is a free, unique, persistent digital identifier for researchers, provided by the non-profit ORCID organisation at orcid.org. Your ORCID iD is a 16-digit number (for example, 0000-0002-1825-0097) that stays with you for your whole career.
Its purpose is disambiguation: it reliably distinguishes you from other researchers with the same or similar names, and it follows you across job moves, name changes and different publishers. Journals, funders and institutions increasingly use ORCID to connect you to your contributions automatically.
Why ORCID matters for your CV
ORCID is the reliable anchor for an academic CV. Because it is an identifier rather than a name, tools can pull your verified publications and link your work without the false matches that plague name-based searches — which matters most for common names and names in non-Latin scripts.
How SigmaCV uses ORCID
You sign in to SigmaCV with your ORCID iD. It reads your public ORCID record, resolves your OpenAlex author profile, and assembles your CV — matching your work by identifier, never by name. It only reads public metadata and never writes anything back to ORCID.
Frequently asked questions
Is ORCID free?
Yes — registering an ORCID iD at orcid.org is free and takes about a minute.