Scholarly Communication Support: Planning, Conducting, Disseminating, Promoting, & Assessing Research

Google Scholar allows researchers to create and customize a profile page, which compiles information about a researcher's publications, how frequently they have been cited, and the researcher's employment and research interests.

Google uses its data to automatically begin and automatically maintain your profile, adding publications and tracking citations over time; however, you also have full control to manually correct and change your page and publications.

In practice, you might think of ResearchGate like an alternative to LinkedIn that is designed specifically for researchers and academics.

This is a for-profit service (as is Academia.edu); read the Terms of Use carefully to know what you are agreeing to when you share your information or your publications on this site.

The ResearchGate platform supports: sharing your publications; collecting statistics about publication views, downloads, and citations; finding colleagues with whom to collaborate; and asking and answering research questions among peers. The site even includes job-hunting features.

BE CAUTIOUS: Your ResearchGate profile will easily let you incorporate citations to your published works and will also allow you to upload full text. Be sure that you know what your publication agreement allows before you upload a file.

You may be allowed to share the "pre-print" version (prior to review), or the "post-print" version (after peer review and revision, but prior to copyediting, formatting, etc.), but not the published version--or you may have greater or lesser restrictions. Every publisher varies. 

Check out the Author's Rights resources in this guide for more on this topic.

 
ImpactStory uses your ORCID unique author identifier to construct a profile of your publications and various metrics related to them, including tweets on Twitter, mentions in blog posts, and downloads in the Mendeley citation manager.

Your ImpactStory profile displays "badges" to recognize certain achievements in global reach, readership, and openness, making it a fun and contemporary way to highlight key pieces of the story of your research products. 

ImpactStory places an emphasis on openness in particular, assigning an OAscore based on what percentage of your publications are freely available online. Your work's openness is another way to tell the story of yourself as a researcher. 

Even if your name isn't as common as "John Smith," you may be startled to discover how many other researchers in your field have similar names. A 2009 study of author-name ambiguity within the MEDLINE database found that nearly two-thirds of authors had ambiguous names.

The problem is exacerbated in disciplines which cite only first initials, such that "Erin Martinez" and "Edward Martinez" are both cited as "Martinez, E." In addition to commonly occuring names, issues with name confusion may also arise as a result of name changes (e.g., at marriage); transliteration; accents, diacritics, or other special characters in a name; or even simple typos.

Unique identifiers assigned to each researcher helps to disambiguate author names, ensuring that your work can clearly be identified and credited to you.

ORCID

ResearcherID (Web of Science)

How to claim an author record

1. If you previously had a Web of Science account, sign in with your credentials to start using Web of Science. If not, select register and create an account
2. Search for your name under the Researchers Search tab.
3. If there is one result that matches your name, select to view publications. If these publications are yours, select 'Claim My Record' to confirm the publications and to receive a Web of Science ResearcherID.

How to merge author records

1. If, after searching your name, you find multiple results that match your name and publications, select the records that apply and select "Merge Records".
2. Web of Science will ask you to verify the publications in each profile and then will begin the process of merging the records. This can take some time.

Scopus Author Identifier