  ORCID is a scientific infrastructure created to solve the problem of author
name ambiguity. Over the years ORCID has also become a useful source for
studying academic activities reported by researchers. Our objective in this
research was to use ORCID to analyze one of these research activities: the
publication of datasets. We illustrate how the identification of datasets that
shared in researchers' ORCID profiles enables the study of the characteristics
of the researchers who have produced them. To explore the relevance of ORCID to
study data sharing practices we obtained all ORCID profiles reporting at least
one dataset in their "works" list, together with information related to the
individual researchers producing the datasets. The retrieved data was organized
and analyzed in a SQL database hosted at CWTS. Our results indicate that
DataCite is by far the most important data source for providing information
about datasets recorded in ORCID. There is also a substantial overlap between
DataCite records with other repositories (Figshare, Dryad, and Zenodo). The
analysis of the distribution of researchers producing datasets shows that the
top six countries with more data producers, also have a relatively higher
percentage of people who have produced datasets out of total researchers with
datasets than researchers in the total ORCID. By disciplines, researchers that
belong to the areas of Natural Sciences and Medicine and Life Sciences are
those with the largest amount of reported datasets. Finally, we observed that
researchers who have started their PhD around 2015 published their first
dataset earlier that those researchers that started their PhD before. The work
concludes with some reflections of the possibilities of ORCID as a relevant
source for research on data sharing practices.
