ORCID iDs in the ACL Anthology

Best practices for ensuring your papers are correctly linked

January 15, 2026

An ORCID iD is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers and links your research outputs and activities to your identity. When these iDs are present on ingested papers, it removes the ambiguity that sometimes arises with popular names and name variants.

We urge every author who is actively publishing papers to create an ORCID iD and to supply this ID to publication systems such as OpenReview¹ and Softconf². Although the Anthology currently only uses the iD itself for grouping papers, adding the following information to your profile is helpful in situations where we manually disambiguate authors, and may be used later for automated matching:

• Add name variants: In your ORCID iD profile, you can set your given and family names, your published name, and any name variants you have published under (e.g., with or without middle initials, maiden names, etc.). It is especially important to make sure you have at least one Latin variant of your name. (This profile is a good example.)
• Make sure your name is visible: We have encountered situations where an individual’s name was private.
• Add educational history and affiliations: When we manually disambiguate an author, we may need to know the institution from which you received (or expect to receive) your highest degree, as part of our human-focused person IDs.

Less importantly, it can be helpful to the disambiguation process if you make the effort to add a few representative publications.

Finally, make sure that the name you enter into submission mangagement systems (such as Softconf or OpenReview) matches one of the ORCID variants, ideally the published name. The name variant entered into these systems is the one that gets used as the paper’s metadata, and should also match the PDF.