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Make your research discoverable and visible

Guidance on ORCID and other persistent identifiers; advice on making your research more discoverable and visible. 

Contact the Open Research team

ORCID id: identifier for researchers

ORCID is a free to create, unique researcher identifier that is permanently linked to you.  It is important as it:

  • Ensures your research outputs, grant applications and activities are correctly attributed to you.
  • Connects you with your contributions and affiliations.
  • Makes your research outputs and activities more discoverable.
  • When linked with the Surrey Open Research Repository, allows the exchange of information between ORCID and our system to minimise the manual input of information. 
  • it is now essential for an increasing number of grant applications and UKRI have integrated ORCID with their grant system

Watch the Why ORCID? video to find out more.

The University strongly encourages all academic staff and postgraduate research students to sign up to ORCID.

Create an ORCID or register your existing ORCID:

Creating an ORCID takes less than two minutes. We recommend creating one within our Open Research Repository or (if you already have one) adding it to the Repository. This will help the exchange of research output information between ORCID, the Repository and other systems.

  • Visit the Open Research Repository
  • In the top right corner, select 'Surrey researchers sign in' (use your university username and password)
  • Select 'edit profile' (top left corner). Scroll down. Under 'global IDs', select 'register' or 'connect' your ORCID ID.

Watch the video How to Create or link your ORCID iD in the Open Research Repository to find out more. 

Use your ORCID iD:

Once you have create and ORCID iD, you can use it to maintain updated your affiliation and in your Publications or Funding Applications.

Publications

We recommend that you quote your ORCID iD when submitting a publication to a journal, whenever the submission system allows. We also recommend that you link your iD to your name in pre-print systems and services such as arXiv. You can also link your ORCID iD to your name in bibliographic databases such as Scopus. Quoting your iD when submitting or uploading your work increases your chances of being accurately identified as the author of your publications.

Funding

UKRI encourage applicants to add their ORCID to the Je-S application system and any iDs in Je-S are made visible on Gateway to Research. The Wellcome Trust and some NIHR programmes now require applicants to have ORCID iDs. Funder-specific information:

DOI: identifier for digital research outputs

The digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier used for journal articles, but DOIs can be also used for other research outputs. DOIs do not change even if your publisher or data repository changes. DOIs can also help with plagiarism screening, cited-by linking, text and data mining etc.

Getting a DOI for your research outputs provides a permanent link to them, so makes it much easier for others to find your work and cite it correctly.

At Surrey, we can assign DOIs to the following research works:

  • Art works
  • Book chapters
  • Compositions
  • Data and data sets – this is now a requirement of the University’s Research Data Management Policy (PDF)
  • Performances
  • PhD theses - this is now part of the University’s e-theses process
  • Portfolios
  • Preprints
  • Reports
  • Working papers.

ISBN: identifier for books

An ISBN is a persistent identifier for books, monographs or conference proceedings. It allows different product forms and editions of a book, whether printed or digital, to be clearly identifiable. It facilitates compilation and updating of book-trade directories and bibliographic databases, such as repositories.

The University of Surrey holds a licence to register ISBNs.

If you are hosting a conference and need an ISBN for your conference proceedings, please email us (openresearch@surrey.ac.uk) the details of the conference and we will allocate an ISBN.

Similarly, if you want to privately publish a report or monograph, send us the information and we will assign an ISBN.

These works can also be made available via the SRI Open Research Repository.

Promote your research

Once you have shared your research Open Access, it is important that you publicise your work further, to make sure that it is as visible as possible, to as many audiences as possible. Below we provide some advice on how to increase the visibility of your research.

Using keywords

Thinking strategically about the keywords submitted with a journal article can significantly enhance the discoverability and visibility of your research – leading to greater readership, recognition and impact.

Keywords are also a way of indicating if your publication is related to a research theme, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or is in a new emergent field. Most journals enable authors to submit a number (usually 4 - 8) of keywords with their articles.

Resources

Read through carefully chosen keywords for the Sustainable Development Goals that reflect the precise language of the UN declaration, as used by the THE Impact Ranking.

Take a look at publisher advice on the optimisation of keywords from: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and IEEE.

See our full guide to using keywords (PDF).

Keyword tips

    Person in suit on their mobile with the word 'keyword' up on their laptop screen

    Accurately convey your keywords

    Keywords should accurately convey the key concepts and main topic of your research

    Man in a suit sat at a table and watching something on his laptop

    Balance your keywords for diversity

    Balance the specificity of the research topic with more general terms used in the subject literature; this will open your work to a more diverse readership

    Student on laptop

    Phrases are more effective

    Phrases of 2 - 3 words (e.g., ‘circular economy’; ‘sustainable tourism policy’) are often more effective than single-words, which can be too equivocal

    Students using computers

    Use keywords your readers might use

    Use variants of the terms or phrases used in the title. Rather than duplicate words already in the title, keywords are an opportunity to use alternative terms which your readers might use

    Computer Science students

    Test on search engines

    Publishers recommend that researchers test out their proposed keywords in search engines and indexing services to check if these keywords would place their publication alongside comparable work

    Tips for getting your research data discovered

    There are a number of things you can do to make your research data easy to find, easy to reuse and importantly, easy to cite.

    Use a disciplinary repository

    Deposit your data in a disciplinary repository (see storing and preserving your data):

    • A recognised disciplinary repository is the first place others in your field will look for data that is relevant to their research
    • Disciplinary repositories will often put more effort into curating and promoting your data
    • Data repositories will rank highly in search engine results
    • If an appropriate disciplinary repository doesn’t exist, you can use a generic one such as Zenodo and Figshare or use the University’s Open Research Repository.

    Write clear metadata

    Ensure the metadata record associated with your research data is as clear, comprehensive, and as complete as possible. The better the description of your data, the easier it will be to find and identify it.

    Use a DOI

    Get a DOI assigned to your research data and use it:

    • A DOI is a permanent link to the location of your data; it’s the quickest way to ensure that other researchers can find your data quickly and easily
    • Remember to include the DOI in the data statement of any relevant publications.

    See open data guidance on how to make your data understandable and reusable.