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Updates from Europe PMC, a global database of life sciences literature

Europe PMC team

 | 11 January 2016

 | 3 MINS READ

Open Author Profiles at Europe PMC: ORCIDs in Action


We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time.

With over 2.2 million articles in Europe PMC linked to about 172,000 unique ORCIDs, we expect this feature to be of wide interest to publishing researchers, journals, funders, and others interested in scientific credit.


Author profiles tour



All you have to do to see your profiles is add your ORCID to the URL:

http://europepmc.org/authors/0000-0000-0000-0000 where 0000-0000-0000-0000 is your ORCID. Alex Batemans looks like this:



At a glance you can see how many of your publications are freely available as full text in Europe PMC (blue) and a count of your open citation (line plot), per year.

Each article making up the profile is also listed individually, together with a graph showing citation over time of each article. It’s interesting to see the different profiles of articles:

1. Some have had their day:Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 11.34.23.png
2. Some are abidingly cited:Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 11.35.28.png
3. Some are a slow burn:Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 11.36.33.png



How do I get an author profile page?

Europe PMC profile pages are based on publically available data. If you have an ORCID, and you have listed your life sciences articles in it using the default (public) settings, then you will have a Europe PMC profile page.

An ORCID is a unique identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers. If you don’t have an ORCID, it takes only a couple of minutes to get one from the ORCID foundation. Then linking articles to your ORCID only takes a few minutes using our ORCID claiming tool.


How do I access my own, or another author’s profile page?


As well as via direct links such as http://www.europepmc.org/authors/0000-0001-8314-8497 , there are various other ways access an author’s profile including:

  1. From a Europe PMC abstract page. Under the abstract, authors that have ORCIDs linked to the article are listed. Click on the author’s name to see the profile of that author. Screenshot 2016-01-11 10.20.41.png
  2. Search for an ORCID. If you know a person’s ORCID, just type it in the search box on any Europe PMC page. At the top of the results list there will be a box displaying the name of the person and a link to their profile.Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 12.33.08.pngScreen Shot 2016-01-11 at 12.35.25.png
  3. Advanced Search. If you know the person’s name, but not the ORCID, use the author search feature in the Advanced Search page. If there is an ORCID for that person in Europe PMC, it will be shown in the autosuggest list, along with an affiliation to help you disambiguate further:Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 12.39.18.png



Author profiles are on trend …


The announcement last week that several leading publishers will require ORCIDs in publications from 2016 onwards will have a direct effect on adoption, as well as encouraging other publishers to take the same position in the longer term. Coupled with the recent launch of CrossRef’s ORCID auto-update feature, in which published articles are pushed to ORCID records on the authors’ behalf, ORCIDs are increasingly becoming embedded in publication workflows. Several funders, including four that use Europe PMC as a designated archive for the research they fund, now either require (Wellcome, NIHR, FWF) or request (ERC) ORCIDs in grant applications. Looking further to the future, the European Commission’s recently funded THOR project is exploring how public datasets can be linked to ORCIDs.

Given these positive trends, we hope the Europe PMC author profiles not only prove of interest and use to researchers but also contribute another facet of clarity for open science. There’s no time like the present to update your ORCID record and see what it looks like through the lens of Europe PMC author profiles!
Useful links

ORCID foundation





Contact us at: engagement@europepmc.org or on Twitter @EuropePMC_news

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Europe PMC is a service of the Europe PMC Funders' Group, in partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); and in cooperation with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NCBI/NLM) . It includes content provided to the PubMed Central (NLM/PMC) archive by participating publishers.