Measuring Your Research Impact: Researcher Profile

The main reason for setting up a profile is as a way to have all your publications listed in the one place. This makes it easy for others to easily identify your work. It is also useful for author disambiguation purposes - different databases display author names differently, and if you have a common name it can be difficult for others to easily identify your work. The tools listed on this page allow you to create a profile with a unique identifier that you can use to identify your output. It is important to note, however, that you do need to keep them up-to-date yourself and ensure that all your publications are included.

There are several tools you can use to promote your research. Below is a list of some of them. This page gives more information on each tool:

• Academia.edu
• Google Scholar
• LinkedIn
• ORCID
• ResearchGate
• Scopus

Academia.edu is used by academics to share their research, monitor the impact of their work and track the publications produced by academics they follow.

Watch the brief tutorial on Academia.edu

ORCID stands for Open Researcher & Contributor ID.  It is an international, interdisciplinary non-profit organization allowing researchers to attain a unique and persistent digital identifier.  A key benefit of ORCID is that it helps solve name ambiguity in research and scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers. 

Scopus is linked to ORCID, allowing researchers to export their existing author information without the manual effort of adding it into the ORCID site itself. This is done by using their existing Scopus Author ID.

Watch the video below to learn how to create an ORCID record from your Scopus Author ID:

Google Scholar allows you to set up a profile which contains your publications. The profile also provides you with various author metrics, such as h-index. In order to set up your profile, you need to have a Google account.

To create your profile:

• Go to http://scholar.google.com and click the "My Citations" link at the top of the page.
• Log in with an existing Google account, or create a new one. • Complete the form with your details, and click the "Next step" button.
• Review the list of publications, and use the "Add" button to add them to your profile. When you've added them all, click the "Next step" button.
• Choose how you would like to deal with changes to publication and citation data, and click the "Go to my profile" button to view your profile.
• If there are articles you've written which don't appear in your list of publications on your profile, you can add them manually by selecting "Add" from the "Actions" drop-down menu.
• To make your profile public, click on either the "Make my profile public" link in the yellow box at the top of the page, or the "edit" link next to "My profile is private".

View Citation Tracking with Google Scholar video

To access scientific knowledge and make your research visible, create a profile on ResearchGate. It allows you to connect with peers and collaborate with specialists in your field.

Below is an introduction video of the site, which includes groups, contacts, forums, discussions, file uploading, events, semantic searching, abstract search, etc.

Many authors have similar names. The Scopus Author Identifier distinguishes between these names by assigning each author in Scopus a unique number and grouping together all of the documents written by that author.  

This is especially useful for distinguishing between authors who share very common names like Smith or Wang or Lee.   Additionally, author names in Scopus can be formatted differently. For example, the same author could appear in one document as Lewis, M; in another as Lewis, M.J; and in another as Lewis, Michael. Scopus Author Identifier matches the documents of this author and groups these name variants together so that authors, even if cited differently, are identified with their specific papers.   This helps you find and recognize an author, despite variations in name spelling.

View Searching for Authors in Scopus tutorial

To request corrections to author details:

1.Run an Author search for the author.
2.On the search results page, click on the author name.
3.On the Author details page, click Request author detail corrections.
4.Complete the Scopus Author Feedback form to provide feedback or report errors.

LinkedIn is a professional career service where you can manage your network, find jobs and market your profile.

Below is a video on the benefits of LinkedIn