Introducing ORCID

ORCID wasn't intended as a massive longitudinal survey of the global population of scientists, but with 3 million profiles and growing, it is becoming just that. So far a quarter of those researchers have voluntarily added personal information to their public ORCID profiles including the years, locations, and descriptions of their education and employment histories. As this voluntary sampling grows, the demographic and migration patterns of the scientific workforce is coming into focus. The biases are also apparent: ORCID users skew young, and certain countries are over- and underrepresented. The code for processing and analyzing the raw profile data are offered here to help researchers explore ORCID, the largest open repository of scientific careers. [NOTE: further context for this data package is provided in Bohannon (2017) 'Restless Minds' at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.356.6339.690].