The Peer review section of your ORCID record is for information about your individual peer review contributions. The organization for which you are carrying out the peer review or evaluation will typically request your iD during the review submission process, as well as asking for permission to update your ORCID record after you complete the review. Like research resources and person identifiers, peer reviews can only be added to your ORCID record by a trusted organization using Member API credentials, with your explicit permission – you cannot manually add them to your record yourself.
The peer review section will not appear on your personal (private) ORCID record until a trusted organization has added a review to your ORCID record. You must make the review activity visible to everyone in order for it to also display on your public ORCID record.
For recording information about serving as a peer reviewer for a journal, conference, faculty, or more, please use the Service affiliation.
Introduction to peer review
Peer review is a fundamental part of the research lifecycle. Using your ORCID iD to enable connections with the organizations for which you perform reviews raises the visibility of your efforts and contributions. This is why ORCID has worked with members of the community to develop ways to recognize resource use and enable you to share that information with publishers, funders, and research organizations.
The peer review section of your ORCID record recognizes individual contributions that you have made to other organizations. These contributions can include evaluation of journal articles and books, as well as conference programs, grant award applications, and hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Unlike other sections of the ORCID record, reviews are automatically aggregated together based on a group identifier, usually for the organization or publication which organized the review. In addition, like works, “Other IDs” (person IDs), and grants, individual reviews are automatically grouped together based on a shared review identifier.
ORCID supports a range of review activities, from double blind reviews, which provide minimum information about a review, to open reviews, which if wished can point directly to the review report and the work that was reviewed.
Peer reviews can only be added to your ORCID record by a trusted organization using Member API credentials. This can be done by the organizer of the review or evaluation, such as a publisher, society, funder, or research institution, or it can be done by a third-party review recognition service, such as Web of Science, which works with review organizers to recognize your reviews. In both cases, in order for your ORCID record to be updated, you will need to verify your iD by signing into ORCID, and grant the review organizer or third-party recognition review permission to update your ORCID record with information about your review contribution.
Fields in a peer review activity
Each review activity combines three elements: information about the reviewer; about the organization sponsoring (or convening) the review; and about the review itself. Optionally, a review activity can include a fourth element: information about the subject of the review. Importantly, each of these components involves a persistent identifier.
Information about the reviewer
- Role (required): The individual’s role in the review process, e.g. chair, editor, member, organizer, reviewer
- Identifier (required): The reviewer’s ORCID iD
Information about the organizer
- Convening organization (required): This describes the organization which organized the review - a journal publisher, conference organizer, funding agency, faculty, etc.
- City (required): The city where the organizer is based
- Region: The region where the organizer is based
- Country (required): The country where the organizer is based
- Identifier (required): The persistent identifier for the organization
Information about the review
- Group (required): An identifier used to group together the reviews on the ORCID record; it describes the group of which the review is part. This could be the name of a journal (Journal of Scientific Investigations) or an organization (Scholarly Publisher, State University)
- Type (required): The type of review activity, e.g., a review, evaluation
- Date (required): When the review was completed. This can be broad (2008) or specific (2010-12-10)
- Review container name: The name of main object of which the review is part, e.g. journal, conference, grant review panel, etc.
- Review identifier (required): A unique resolvable identifier provided by the source for the review itself. This is used to prevent duplication of review activity. Reviews can have more than one identifier, and multiple reviews with the same identifier will group together
- Review URL: A link to the representation of the review online
Information about the review subject
- Review subject name: The title of the item reviewed
- Review subject type: The type of item that was reviewed, e.g. article, grant, monograph
- Review subject identifier: A unique resolvable identifier for the reviewed item, e.g. a DOI
- Review subject URL: A link to the reviewed item online