Online Profiles

Ways to maximize your impact, improve visibility, and boost impact.

Establishing your "brand" and promoting your research output is increasingly important. The interconnectedness of the internet and availability of new online tools allow for simple mechanisms to extend the reach of research and scholarly output.

Why Create a Profile?

• To make your research and teaching activities known
• To increase the chance of publications getting cited
• To correct attribution, names, and affiliations
• To increase the chance of new contacts for research cooperation
• To increase your scholarly visibility

There are two basic types of profiles, researcher author identifies and scholarly network profiles in online communities.

Online Communities

Academia.edu is a large researcher social network and connects scholars to each other. You can add papers through a built in search using Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and ArXiv. You can also add ful text. Academia.edu can email you analytics about searchers finding your profile and publications.

ResearchGate is a large social network linking researchers by topics with the intent to connect possible collaborators. It can be used to ask colleagues questions. You can choose which topics or researchers to follow. You can automatically populate your publications list or add items from reference management tools or add manually. You can even upload and share full text publications (e.g. last author versions that many publishers allow you to share).

Mendeley started as a free online reference manager. Now owned by Elsevier, it has become "an academic social network where you can manage your research, showcase your work, connect and collaborate with over five million researchers worldwide."

Researcher IDs

ORCID – is an effort to connect all these researcher ID-systems together. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID is still in development, but you can create a profile, link it to your Scopus ID, ResearchID, and other systems.

ResearcherID - is connected to Web of Science, EndNote, and Journal Citation Reports. Researcher ID offers a public profile. You can choose what to show publicly. Researcher ID is also important as a basis to provide feedback to Web of Science for grouping author name variants or corrections to affiliations.

The Scopus Author ID helps author recognition and disambiguation when searching publications. Many researchers already have a Scopus ID without realizing it. You can still claim and manage your Scopus Author ID by establishing an account in Scopus.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar - The Google Scholar author pages are their own stand alone profile using Google data. You can create a Google Scholar profile to quickly showcase your publication list and view citation history and find cited works. Many Google Scholar citations are incomplete and inaccurate, you can improve access to your publications by creating an account and identifying which publications in their database are yours.