After registering for your ORCID, you can add personal information, educational background, grant awards, and works to your profile. Adding these things will increase the usefulness of your profile for others who wish to determine what work you have done in the past. Get started with edits by signing in to your account.

Note: For an overview on how to edit your profile page, see this post by Rebecca Bryant.

If you have already created a Google Scholar profile, you can populate your ORCID profile using the citations listed there. Navigate to your Google Scholar profile and select the citations you'd like to add to ORCID. Click on "Export" and select "BibTeX." Copy your citations into a text editor and save the file as a .bib file with UTF-8 encoding.

Next navigate to your ORCID profile. Under "Add Works," select "Import BibTeX." Select your .bib file and complete the import.

Under "Works," you can add your publications, performances, reviews, and other academic works in one of three ways. First, you can import citations from databases.

To begin, in the "Works" section, select "Add Works" and then "Search and Link." You will see a list of databases that allow import directly into ORCID. Depending on where you have published in the past, some of these options may be more helpful to you than others. Strong options include: 

1.) ResearcherID: Allows you to import citations from Web of Science

2.) Scopus to ORCID: Allows you to import citations where you've published with Elsevier

3.) MLA International Bibliography: Allows you to import from MLA International Bibliography

4.) CrossRef Metadata Search: Allows you to import from a registry of more than 70 million articles, conference proceedings, books, and book chapters that have received DOIs upon publication

To import citations from any of these databases, choose one and you will launch a search on your name as author. A wizard will prompt you to select your citations and associate them with your ORCID profile. For both Web of Science and Scopus, you will ultimately be assigned a ResearcherID and Scopus AuthorID (if you do not already have one) and these identifiers will be associated with your ORCID.

Note that while you are importing citations, you can choose to have databases automatically update your profile, adding citations whenever you publish. Find out more on the ORCID blog about automatic updates provided by Scopus, CrossRef, and Web of Science.

If you cannot find your citations in Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef, Google Scholar or another database, you can enter them manually. Under either "Funding" or "Works" in your ORCID profile, navigate to "Add manually." ORCID provides some 37 work types that you can choose from when listing citations. These include categories like artistic performance, data set, invention, lecture, and license.