Research Impact & Visibility: Researcher profiles

On this page you will find a comparison chart of available research profile websites

You might try one or more of these:

1. Create a Google (Scholar) account and activate Google Scholar Citations
2. Create an ORCID account
3. Create a ResearcherID
4. Check your Scopus Author ID
5. Create a ResearchGate acoount
6. Create an Academia.edu account
7. Create a Mendeley account
8. Login to your UU-profile and make it richer

On request the library organises hands on workshops for UU research groups and graduate schools. Interested? Get into contact.

There are many things you can do to enhance the visibility of your research:

• Analyse who is using your research and through which channels
• Avoid journals that are not well-indexed
• Create an ORCID
• Blog and tweet selectively on your research topics
• Deposit your publications in the university repository
• Produce a short video pitch on your main research topic
• Publish Open Access
• Share an early version of your paper as pre-print (ArXiv, bioRxiv, preprints.org, Cognet, RepEc, SSRN, PeerJ Preprints etc.)
• Share your data (FigShare, Dutch Dataverse network etc.)
• Upload full text of your papers to your researcher profiles or your own website
• Use a stable and full author name and affiliation
• Use research profiles to unambiguously link publications to you

• To make your research and teaching activities known
• To increase the chance of publications getting cited
• To correct attribution, names and affiliations
• To make sure that a much as possible is counted in research assessments
• To increase the chance of new contacts for research cooperation
• To increase the chance of funding
• To serve society better

There are various types of sites and services that are important in fostering your visibility:

• Author disambiguation services: ORCID and ResearcherID (and also DAI, VIAF and ISNI that are managed by libraries and registration agencies and require no user action from academics)
• Personal sites and social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, own website, blog
• Researcher Communities: Academia / ResearchGate
• Reference managrment tools with social functions: Mendeley
• Search engines with author profiles: Google Scholar, Scopus
• University author profile pages: UU pages

* Academia figures include students and alumni

There is also a training available to learn more about researcher profiles

Whether you like it or not, Google Scholar is by far the most widely used bibliographical tool for scholarly publications. It has a problem however, and that is metadata control. You can enhance your findability by creating an account and telling Google which publications in their database are yours. After taking these steps searches on your name will show your profile on top of the results. The profile itself shows your list of publications in Google Scholar with basic metrics. Besides journal papers, it may also include books and reports.

1. If you do not yet have a Google account, go to Google and create it.
2. Go to Google Scholar, make sure you are logged in and click "My Citations"
3. Follow instructions to create your profile and add or remove publications that are yours or not yours

• You can get an overview of people at our institution with a Google Scholar profile
• Once you have activated your profile, Google Scholar gives you automatically reading suggestions based on your citations (on the homepage and a full list by clicking "my updates")
• You can track new papers and citations (of yourself and/or others)
• More about Google Scholar Citations
• More on Google Scholar in general in in the LibGuide Google Scholar

NB Because new articles are automatically added to authors' profiles it is wise to check regularly, because in rare cases articles may be wrongly attributed to you.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-proprietary, international ID that provides you with a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. It is strategically important because it enables all databases to automatically link publications to you by your ORCID. At ORCID you can create a profile, link it to your Scopus ID, ResearchID and/or import publications from a so-called crossref search. Further functionality is being developed.

1. Go to ORCID, register for an ORCID ID (under "for researchers") and complete your profile
2. Click "import research activities" and follow instructions to import publication details from e.g. Scopus
3. Click "view public ORCID record" to check whether it does not show anything you do not like to be publicly visible

• More about the ORCID registry

ResearcherID is the profile tool from Thomson Reuters, the owners of Web of Science and the 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.

1. Go to Researcher ID, sign up and complete your profile.
2. Add some publications if you have a few listed in Web of Science and preview the public version of your profile.
3. If you already have made an ORCID ID you can link Researcher ID to that. It is best to do that in a place where you have access to Web of Science.

The Scopus Author ID is not a researcher profile site, but helps author recognition and disambiguation when searching publications. Many researchers already have a Scopus ID without realising it. By checking the correctness of publications assigned to your Scopus Author ID, you will certainly help others finding your stuff. It will also improve completeness and correctness of citation analyses. And it also improves feeds of your publications list to be shown on other sites.

1. Go to Scopus and use the author search tab to search for your own name
2. Check if all publications assigned to you are correct and if there are no variants of your name that are not yet grouped to your main entry.
3. If there are ungrouped name variants with your publications send Scopus feedback by checking name variants and clicking "request to merge authors" on top of the results list. (For that it may be required to create a personal account within the institutional license).
   

• If you want to get an idea of the problem of author disambiguation have a look at this search for H. Wang
  
• Have a look at the list of Utrecht authors in Scopus (with and without Scopus ID)
  
• Did you know there is a free Scopus author preview?
  
• More about the Scopus Author ID
  

ResearchGate is a very large (originally German) researcher community linking researchers around topics. It is frequently used to ask questions to collegues all over the world that have the same set of interests and specialisations. 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).

1. Go to Researchgate, sign up and complete your profile with whatever you think relevant.
2. Add your publications by clicking add publications" and choosing "author match".
3. Select one or two topics to follow if you want

• ResearchGate also has a public list of researchers that have joined researchgate
• Full text publications uploaded to Researchgate profiles are indexed by Google Scholar
• Researchgate also boosts metrics for individuals and institutions: RG-score (total activity and weighed interaction, plus publications) and impact points (number of publications weighed by journals they are published in).
• More about ResearchGate

Academia.edu is a large researcher community. Just as ResearchGate it connects scholars around topics. You can add papers through a built in search using Microsoft Academic, PubMed and ArXiv. You can also add ful text. The process is easy, but the coverage not as comprehensive as Google Scholar.

1. Go to Academia.edu and sign up.
2. Add publications/papers by clicking your name top right, then "add papers"and "import"
3. Find a few people in your field to follow

• Full text publications uploaded to Academica profiles are indexed by Google Scholar
• More about Academia.edu and FAQ

One of the steps towards visibility and efficient reference management is a Mendeley account. Mendeley is an Elsevier-owned reference management tool that is used by millions of researchers, offers immediate readership statistics and has strong social functions. Probably many of your publications are already present in the Mendeley database, but with your own account you can make sure that all of them are. And you can do much, much more.

1. Mendeley, make an account.
2. Complete your profile
3. Add publications:
1. (PDF-)files of (your) papers on your hard drive (in one go)
2. references from a search in Google Scholar or another bibliographic database
4. Start building a network of colleagues or (open or closed) groups

• More about Mendeley
  

Of course, for the reference management function of Mendeley there are many alternatives, such as Zotero, Endnote, RefWorks and more. See the seperate guide on reference management.

The Utrecht University staff profile pages are available since Spring 2013. You can add your CV, profile and list additional functions (free text). It also lists your publications as entered in the University Research Information System Metis. Often this is done for you by the faculty or department administration once every 3, 6 or 12 months. However, one thing you can do yourself is upload the full text of publications to make these more visible. 

1) Go to your UU profile page and start editing by logging in top right. Add some text on tthe CV tab. Even just listing one or two current research projects, areas of expertise or subject keywords will help foster your visibility

2) Have a look at your contact information tab. Add links to your other profiles (Linked-In, Google Scholar, ORCID, Academia and others you may have). You can also choose to adds these links to the profile tab.

3) Have a look at your publication list. Are there titles of which you have the full text available to upload? It does help to do this. You can do this via your PURE account. Your publications will become available in the Utrecht University repository and by that will become easily findable with free full text in Google Scholar. That means they are available to scholars, professionals and lay people, even if they do not have access to the expensive journal plaforms. Yes, there are sometime copyright issues, but  the good thing is: the library always does a final copyright check. In some cases you are not allowed to upload the publisher version of papers, but are allowed to upload your last author version (after peer review but without the publisher's typesetting etc.)

• more information on Open Access sharing in our Open Access LibGuide

Economics: RepEc author service