Standards
Research Organization Registry (ROR) ID
An open identifier for research organizations.
- Kind
- Identifiers
- Steward
- Research Organization Registry
- Official source
- https://ror.org/
What it describes
ROR IDs identify research organizations in an open registry. They help distinguish institutions with similar names, multiple languages, or changing labels in publication and funding metadata. The registry also supplies names, locations, and external identifier links. ROR's scope is research organizations, so its records should be read as organizational references for research workflows rather than a general registry of every legal entity.
An institution's ROR record can be updated, merged, or marked inactive as organizational structures change. An affiliation string in a paper still requires interpretation: a department, hospital, campus, and parent university may be represented at different levels. Keep the original affiliation text, matched ROR ID, registry version or lookup date, and reason for the match to preserve the distinction.
Structure
Globally unique ROR identifier expressed as a resolvable URL.
Useful for
- Normalize publication affiliations.
- Join grants to research institutions.
- Reconcile name variants across datasets.
Limits
- Scope is research organizations.
- Not a legal-entity register.
- Affiliation strings may name a different organizational level.
How it is used in practice
Affiliation strings in papers are a mess. "Dept. of Pharmacology, Univ. of Halden", "Halden University" and "Universität Halden" can all name one institution, and "Halden University Hospital" names a different one that belongs to it. ROR gives each research organization a persistent identifier, and publishers, funders and repositories increasingly collect it so that affiliation metadata can be matched without guessing. The registry is open, its data can be downloaded in bulk, and it can be queried through a public interface.
A ROR record carries names of several kinds, including acronyms and aliases, a location, a status that says whether the organization is active, links to other identifiers, and relationships to other organizations. The relationships are typed as parent, child, related, predecessor or successor, which makes it possible to represent the way a hospital belongs to a university or a laboratory descends from an older institute.
A worked example
A fictional funder wants to total the grants awarded to the University of Halden. Its award file has an affiliation string for each grantee, spelled many ways. Some strings name a department, some a hospital and some a campus.
The funder maps each string to a ROR ID and records the string, the ID, the lookup date and the reason for the match. Where a string names a hospital that is a child of the university in the registry, a decision is needed. A total for the legal institution includes the hospital if the funder's rule says so, and excludes it if the rule says otherwise. Either choice is acceptable when written down with the relationship that supports it. The reported total then comes with its rule, and a reader can reproduce it from the file and the registry version.
Evaluating a claim that rests on a ROR ID
Check the level. A ROR ID points to an organization in a hierarchy, and a claim about the university, the faculty and the hospital are three claims. Check the status and the date: organizations merge, split and close, and a predecessor or successor relationship may explain why a record from an earlier year carries an ID that now looks inactive. A match made years ago should be rechecked against the current record before it supports a current claim.
Check the match itself. Automated matching of affiliation strings to ROR IDs is useful and imperfect; it makes errors on short strings, common names and organizations that share a name across countries. A record that stores only the matched ID hides the uncertainty. Keep the original string, the method and a flag for matches that were reviewed by a person.
Confusions to avoid
ROR is not a legal-entity register. A research organization in ROR may correspond to a legal entity, part of one, or an informal network, and ROR makes no claim about incorporation or ownership. For legal facts use a company or charity register, or an LEI where one exists, and link the two with a sourced statement.
It is also not a ranking, an accreditation or a statement of research quality. Presence in the registry reflects the registry's scope and curation, not an assessment of the organization. Finally, do not confuse the older identifier scheme that ROR drew on with ROR itself. ROR's cross-references to other identifiers are statements in the record and should be cited as such, not assumed to be one-to-one.
Questions a reviewer can ask
What was the original affiliation string, and how was it matched to a ROR ID? Was the match reviewed by a person? At which level of the hierarchy is the ID, and does the claim need that level? Is the record active, or does it have a predecessor or successor that explains a change? Which registry version was used? Are totals by institution stated with the rule on children and related organizations?
Related terms
Found an error on this page? See corrections for what counts as one, how to report it and the dated log.
Enquiry
Which of your sources carry Research Organization Registry (ROR) ID?
Tell us which sources carry it, which key the same entity some other way and who may read which. We reply with whether and how a first record would use this identifier.
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