Frequently Asked Questions

ScholarList is a research discovery and tracking tool built around researcher identities. You search for researchers by name or ORCID iD, open their profile, follow the ones you care about, organize them into WatchLists, and save papers into ReadingLists. Rather than trying to keep up with research through a noisy feed, it gives you a personal place to keep track of the people and papers that actually matter to you.

Once you have found the right researcher, there was never a simple way to just keep them somewhere and come back later. Names are ambiguous, people move between institutions, and their work is scattered across databases. ScholarList starts from the researcher rather than the document, so you can find someone once and keep an eye on them from then on.

Anyone who needs to keep track of researchers or scholarly work. That includes researchers and faculty, PhD and master's students, librarians and information professionals, editors and journal staff, and anyone exploring a field or looking for potential collaborators.

No. There are no follower counts, likes, or algorithmically generated feeds. ScholarList is closer to a personal organizing tool than a social platform. You decide who to follow and how your lists are organized, nothing is ranked or recommended to you.

Yes, ScholarList is free to use, with no paid plan required for any of its current features. If that ever changes, we will make it clear well before anything is introduced.

No. ScholarList does not run advertising and does not use third-party trackers that follow you across other websites. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics for basic, cookieless traffic statistics, which is described in full in our Privacy Policy.

Use the search box and enter a name, a partial name, or an ORCID iD, full or partial. Results are pulled live from ORCID's public search index.

Names alone are not reliable identifiers. Two researchers can share a name, and the same person can publish under different name variants over a career. An ORCID iD is a permanent identifier tied to one specific person, which lets ScholarList tell researchers apart with confidence that a name search alone cannot.

No. ScholarList is an independent project. ORCID provides the identifier system and public API that ScholarList relies on, but ScholarList is not owned, operated, or endorsed by ORCID, and a researcher appearing on ScholarList does not mean ORCID has reviewed or approved anything about that profile.

A ScholarList profile is not the same thing as a ScholarList account. Profiles are built from publicly available ORCID and OpenAlex information, so a researcher can appear in search results and have a page here without ever creating an account themselves.

Not directly on ScholarList, since it mirrors the researcher's own ORCID record rather than being an independent source. If something needs correcting, the change should be made on ORCID itself, and it will reflect here the next time that profile refreshes. If you spot something that looks wrong, you're welcome to let us know through the contact form and we'll take a look.

A profile is only as complete as what its source provides. ORCID records can include a credit name, given name, and family name that differ from how someone is cited in a particular paper, and not every researcher's record lists every affiliation or publication. Missing information usually means the underlying source doesn't have it yet, not that ScholarList dropped it.

ScholarList periodically refreshes profile data from ORCID and OpenAlex so it doesn't stay permanently out of date. Core details refresh roughly every day, while employment, education, and funding history refresh on a slower, roughly two-week cycle, since that information changes less often.

Publications and their metadata come primarily from ORCID. Citation counts, h-index, and related metrics come from OpenAlex. When you add a paper by DOI directly, ScholarList looks it up through Crossref first, with DataCite as a fallback for DOIs Crossref doesn't cover.

No, ScholarList is not a repository. It shows publication metadata and links out to wherever the paper actually lives, whether that's a publisher's page, a repository, or a DOI resolver. Whether the full text is free or behind a paywall depends entirely on that external source.

A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a permanent identifier for a publication, formatted something like 10.1000/xyz123. You can paste a bare DOI, a full doi.org link, or even a sentence containing one into the Add by DOI dialog in a ReadingList, and ScholarList will pull out the DOI and fetch its metadata automatically.

These figures aren't universal. Different databases index different sets of papers, use different matching methods, and update on different schedules, so Google Scholar, Scopus, and OpenAlex can each report a different number for the same person. ScholarList shows OpenAlex's figures specifically, clearly labeled as such, rather than presenting any single number as the definitive one.

We wouldn't recommend relying on them alone. For decisions like hiring, funding, or promotion, verify important figures against the primary source and the methodology your institution actually requires, since ScholarList's numbers are only as good as OpenAlex's coverage of that particular researcher.

Following a researcher is the basic relationship, it adds them to your main WatchList so you don't have to search for them again. Custom WatchLists let you go further and group followed researchers however makes sense to you, for example by field, project, or potential collaborators.

Yes to both. You can create as many custom WatchLists as you need, and a single researcher can belong to several of them at once if that fits how you're organizing things.

ScholarList warns you first and tells you which custom WatchLists they'll be removed from, so you're never caught off guard by an unfollow cleaning up your collections behind the scenes.

Yes. Your dashboard keeps a short Recently Unfollowed history for about a week, with a one-click Follow Again button, specifically to make an accidental unfollow easy to reverse.

A ReadingList is a place to save papers you want to read, revisit, or share. Every account has one Master List, which holds every paper you've ever saved, and from there you can organize papers into as many additional custom ReadingLists as you like.

Yes. Each custom list gets its own name, an optional description, and a color of your choosing, so your lists stay visually easy to tell apart at a glance.

Yes, any custom list can be switched to public with a shareable link. Once public, anyone with that link can view the list without signing in, and it may be picked up by search engines or copied by a visitor before you take it down. Because of that, keep anything sensitive out of a public list's name or description.

Yes. If you're signed in, you can copy an entire public list, or individual papers from it, straight into your own Master List with one click.

Yes, you can pin up to three lists at a time so they always sit at the top of your ReadingList view.

ScholarList's search isn't a general web search, it queries ORCID's own public search index directly, ranked by ORCID's own relevance engine rather than anything ScholarList re-ranks itself.

Yes, and it's the most reliable way to find a specific person. Both full and partial ORCID iDs work.

Usually because the name was entered differently than it appears in the researcher's record, or the ORCID iD has a typo. Try the researcher's full name, or their ORCID iD if you have it.

ScholarList limits how many searches can come from one network in a short window, to keep the service responsive for everyone and prevent automated abuse. It clears itself after a few minutes.

Yes. Your last ten searches are stored only in your own browser, not in your ScholarList account, so no one else can see them and they never leave your device.

Since ScholarList is built around researcher identity, it made sense to use ORCID for account sign-in too rather than introduce a separate password system. It also means there's no ScholarList password to ever be stolen, because there isn't one.

No, never. Authentication happens entirely on ORCID's side, and ScholarList only receives your ORCID iD and name once you've signed in there.

No, ordinary account creation doesn't require one. An email address is only ever collected if you separately choose to use the contact form to send us a message.

Yes, through your ORCID account's connected-applications settings. Revoking access there doesn't automatically delete your ScholarList account, so if you want your ScholarList data removed too, use the account deletion option in Settings as well.

You can set an optional display name for your own navbar and Settings page in the Settings screen. It only changes what you see privately, since search and public profiles always show your name exactly as it appears on ORCID, so you stay findable there. It never edits your actual ORCID record.

Yes, Settings lets you add links for a handful of platforms, which then appear on your public profile. Only add ones you're comfortable making public.

You can delete your account any time from Settings. It's not instant, deletion is scheduled with a thirty-day grace period, and signing back in with ORCID during that window fully restores everything exactly as it was. After thirty days, the account and all its data are permanently removed.

Not necessarily. Your account and a public researcher profile are different things. A profile can exist independently, built from public ORCID and OpenAlex data, so deleting your ScholarList account doesn't make that public information disappear. If you'd like your profile reviewed, reach out through the contact form.

No, on both counts. ScholarList has never sold personal information and doesn't use it for advertising of any kind. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

A small number, each with one specific job: keeping you signed in, remembering your theme preference, and protecting account actions from cross-site request forgery. None are used for advertising or sold to anyone.

Please use the contact form and clearly mark your message as a security report. We'd appreciate the chance to look into and fix anything before it's shared publicly.

No, and it isn't trying to be. ScholarList organizes and displays information from ORCID, OpenAlex, Crossref, and DataCite, and those sources can occasionally be incomplete or out of date. When precision genuinely matters, check the original source directly.

Each one indexes a different slice of scholarly output and updates on its own schedule, so gaps between them are normal rather than a sign that one is wrong. For a researcher's identity, their own ORCID record is usually the most reliable starting point.

Yes, there's a Refresh profile button on every researcher page. It pulls the latest available information from ORCID, though it can't surface anything the source itself doesn't have yet.

Yes, both have their own direct links. Public researcher profiles and public ReadingLists can be viewed by anyone, even without a ScholarList account.

They can, though ScholarList doesn't control whether or when a search engine actually chooses to index a given page.

ScholarList is meant for normal individual browsing, not bulk extraction. Automated scraping or attempts to work around rate limits aren't permitted under our Terms of Use, and would also risk running against the terms of the underlying data sources.

Not even close, and that's deliberate. The core is live and stable, but plenty is still being built, including a fuller Resources section and richer ways to explore collaboration between researchers.

Use the Feature Request or Report Issue links in the footer. For bugs, a short note on what you were doing, what happened, and what you expected instead is genuinely the fastest way to get something fixed.

No, it serves a different purpose than either. ORCID is the identity registry, and Google Scholar is a general scholarly search engine. ScholarList sits alongside both, focused specifically on following the researchers you've already found and organizing the papers you want to keep.