Three universities. All called Lincoln University. Not affiliated, not branches — just different institutions in different parts of the world:
They’re not the only ones. Consider:
Same acronym. Different institutions.
Without a unique identifier, even the best metadata systems can misroute or misattribute research. RoR fixes that by assigning each organization a persistent, globally unique ID.
What is RoR, really?
RoR stands for the Research Organization Registry. It’s a community-led, open registry that provides unique, persistent identifiers for research organizations. It covers everything from universities and labs to funding bodies and scholarly societies.
RoR was launched in 2019 by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library. It has grown to become a key infrastructure component in scholarly publishing and metadata workflows.
Why RoR IDs are essential
In an ideal world, systems handling article metadata would always recognize the right institution. But in practice, metadata often travels across different platforms and stakeholders — submission systems, repositories, funder portals, discovery tools, institutional dashboards. Each one has its own database and structure.
Without a shared, standard identifier, these systems rely on text-based affiliation fields. Institution names appear in many forms — and that variation can trip up automated systems. Differences in language, abbreviations, spelling, or punctuation can all affect how a name is recognized and matched.
Using RoR IDs at the point of data creation removes ambiguity. It eliminates the need foreach recipient to do name matching, guessing, or patching. It gives everyone from the start a shared, system-friendly way to identify the institution correctly.
Who uses RoR?
RoR has been adopted across scholarly infrastructure by a range of organizations involved in producing, sharing, and tracking research:
While researchers don’t assign RoR IDs themselves, their work can still be affected by how accurately affiliations are recorded. If an incorrect or missing RoR ID causes a mismatch, it can lead to:
Researchers can help reduce this risk by providing full, specific affiliation details during submission. Listing just a department, university, and country may not be enough — especially when multiple institutions share the similar sounding names. Lincoln University is a good example: there’s one in Pennsylvania and another in Missouri. Without additional detail, even well-configured systems might map the affiliation to the wrong RoR ID.
Getting RoR right from the start
To find your institution’s RoR ID, go to https://ror.org. The search tool is straight forward, and every listing includes key metadata, homepage links, and organizational type. If you can’t find your institution, or see something off, there’s a feedback button right there on the page.
For developers and system integrators, RoR provides a REST API and downloadable dataset. All under a CC0 license.
Why it matters in the long run
RoR IDs don’t just clean up metadata—they make it work. When the right ID is present, articles are routed to the right places, institutions get the credit they deserve, and researchers remain visible in the right contexts.
But if the ID is wrong—or worse, missing—the results can be confusing, sometimes comical, and occasionally damaging.
