Availability of ORCIDs in publications archived in PubMed, MEDLINE, and Web of Science Core Collection

The purpose of this paper was to assess ORCID availability in articles indexed in PubMed, MEDLINE (WoS Platform), and in the Web of Science Core Collection databases. The results showed an overall increase in the percentage of references with ORCIDs in these databases over time. Nevertheless, in PubMed over the period 2012–2020, only 13.9% of the articles had at least one ORCID, and only 4.3% of the authors had an ORCID. The analysis of journals indexed in PubMed show that only about half of all journals (51.6%) allow the use of ORCIDs in their articles during the submission process. The comparison of availability of ORCIDs in PubMed and MEDLINE show higher implementation of ORCIDs in MEDLINE due to differences in the methods used to collect ORCIDs (from publisher for PubMed and from ORCID registry for MEDLINE). These results suggest that entering ORCIDs by authors during the submission process is tedious and time consuming and hinders a larger presence of ORCIDs in PubMed. This study also shows that only using ORCIDs to collect researcher output is still unreliable in these bibliographic databases. This should convince decision-makers to establish recommendations encouraging all actors involved in research to consider more frequent use of ORCIDs.