Generating CiNii Articles Links from a Researcher Number — How the NII Researcher ID Works

While updating a university’s faculty information system, I came across the following note.

Based on the researcher number, the CiNii Articles page URL is displayed automatically.

I had assumed CiNii Articles links were something you had to look up by hand, but it turns out they can be generated mechanically from the researcher number. Here is how the mapping works.

What is a researcher number

It is the 8-digit number used for KAKENHI (JSPS Grants-in-Aid) applications and management. It is assigned to researchers registered in e-Rad and uniquely identifies a researcher in the KAKEN database and various researcher information systems.

Example: 80802743

What is the NII researcher ID

This is a researcher identifier managed by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and used in CiNii Articles. It is a 13-digit number formed by prefixing 1000 to the researcher number.

Researcher number: 80802743
NII researcher ID: 1000080802743

This conversion rule is documented in the CiNii Articles help.

Generating a CiNii Articles URL

With the NII researcher ID, you can reach a researcher’s publication list page via the following URL.

https://ci.nii.ac.jp/nrid/{NII researcher ID}

For researcher number 80802743:

https://ci.nii.ac.jp/nrid/1000080802743

In Python this is a one-liner.

researcher_number = "80802743"
nii_id = f"1000{researcher_number}"
cinii_url = f"https://ci.nii.ac.jp/nrid/{nii_id}"
# → https://ci.nii.ac.jp/nrid/1000080802743

Applied example: auto-filling a faculty information system

On the University of Tokyo’s faculty information edit form (alaya), entering this URL into the ciniiArticles field causes a CiNii Articles link to appear on the public page.

The researcher number is already entered in a separate field (researcherNumber), so the URL can be derived from the same value.

KAKEN_ID = "80802743"

FILL_VALUES = {
    "researcherNumber": KAKEN_ID,
    "ciniiArticles": f"https://ci.nii.ac.jp/nrid/1000{KAKEN_ID}",
    # ...
}

Summary

Once the conversion rule is known, it can also be used in scripts that process large amounts of researcher information in bulk.