Could ORCID play a key role in meta-research? Discussing new analytical possibilities to study the dynamics of science and scientists

Funders, publishers, technology companies, science policy makers and researchers are becoming increasingly interested in meta-research to better understand science dynamics. The emerging field of meta-research is strongly dependent on the availability of data sources in order to empirically study its main actors, activities and interactions. Scientometric data sources have been traditionally the most used sources until now. However, their almost exclusive focus on journal publications limits our understanding by leaving out aspects of the scientific endeavour that go beyond scientific publishing. Examples of these under-studied aspects include large-scale analyses of research careers, broad diversification of careers (i.e., scientists working at non-profit organisations, industry, etc.), or the development of non-scholarly outputs (e.g., blog posts, news and social media contributions, grey literature, etc.). In this chapter, we explore the conceptual and technological potential of the public data recorded in the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) platform to expand the field of meta-research. Over the years ORCID has evolved from an identifier of individual researchers and their scholarly outputs, to also capture a large range of additional meta-research elements (e.g., researchers’ education and affiliation background, scholarly and non-scholarly outputs, funding and grants, etc.). This chapter discusses the potential of ORCID as a research data source by describing its benefits to the field of meta-research and using examples to illustrate them from a practical point of view. It also critically examines what are the most important technical limitations, as well as ethical issues that this source currently presents and how they could be overcome.