Registration and use of ORCID by pharma

Encore poster presented at the virtual 16th Annual Meeting of ISMPP, June 16–18, 2020ObjectiveAn ORCID identifier (ORCID iD) provides an author with a unique, persistent digital identifier, providing author disambiguation and increasing transparency and discoverability. We analyzed the uptake and use of ORCID iDs by six pharmaceutical companies.Research design and methodsRegistration data for pharma authors were extracted and pooled using ORCID’s application programming interface (API) and company email domains (e.g. @gsk.com). To assess ORCID use at the publication level, a search for clinical trial’ was conducted for each organization in PubMed (01/01/2018–01/07/2019); author information was retrieved using ORCID’s API for the ORCID iDs found in the PubMed record metadata. ResultsPharma ORCID registrations increased between 01/06/2017 and 30/06/2019, based on email domains; GlaxoSmithKline demonstrated a higher than average increase in registrations, following an internal pilot. PubMed data for 843 articles from 346 journals were extracted. Of the 10 091 authors, an ORCID iD was included 388 times (4%); 56% corresponded to first/last author. Only one ORCID iD was submitted for 68% of papers (158/234) that included ORCID iDs. Of the 343 unique iDs, 17% were affiliated to the six companies. Of the authors that included ORCID iDs and authored multiple papers, 91% (110/121) inconsistently provided an iD on all publications captured. Records listed employment details (28%), funding (5%) and published works (48%), and 67% were updated within the 3 months before analysis. ConclusionsORCID uptake by pharma is increasing. However, despite an increase in the registration and use of ORCID, the inclusion of ORCID iDs in published articles remains inconsistent. Education of authors, journals and editors on the benefits of ORCID may improve practices in scholarly publishing.