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Research Impact: Develop Your Research Profile

Your Researcher Profile

In an environment where more and more research is published every day, a researcher profile will help you to:

  • make you and your research more discoverable
  • find and be found by potential collaborators
  • create and manage a publication list
  • avoid misidentification
  • create opportunities to be cited

There are a number of profiles that can be created, and you may find that more than one is useful in reaching your target audience.  Your profile allows you to curate and control your professional online presence. As such your profile will need to be updated and managed, so allocate time to make sure they stay up to date.  Talk to one of our Librarians to help you choose which tool is right for you and to help you manage your research profile.

Research Profile Tools

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor iD) provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. This is especially problematic for people who have a common name e.g. Smith, J.

This unique ID will link you to your research publications and activities. ORCID is integrated into the research process from grant applications, submitting and publishing articles, through to citation databases such as Scopus.

ORCID is a not-for-profit organization that is international in scope, free to researchers and importantly, quick and easy to set up. All you need to do is register, add your information such as publications, affiliations, name variations, key words that describe your research. You can also decide who can see your profile using privacy settings.

A Google Scholar profile gives you access to a wider range of sources (especially conferences, technical reports and eprints) and it is freely available. However, be careful as it can be difficult to create a reliable H-index because the content is very fluid and double counting of duplicate records is common.

Anyone searching Google Scholar can find your profile and see a full list of your papers

1. Create a public Author Profile in Google Scholar Citations

2. Claim your papers

3. Group any duplicate papers

4. Your h-index will be automatically calculated

You can also create a Group profile for your research team to enable you to keep track of the outputs produced and their impact.

 

Altmetric  is a free bookmarklet that collects statistics on interest in each article from Twitter, Facebook, science blogs, mainstream news outlets and many more sources.

 

Publish or Perish 

Free software that generates many impact statistics including h-index, g-index, total cites, average cites etc.

Social Media

Social Media platforms are useful tools for researchers to raise their profile within their peer groups and discipline. Many of these platforms ask you to share your publications on the site.

  • Keep track of your publications
  • read and discuss publications with other authors and experts
  • find collaborators
  • expose your work to your peers at any point in the research lifecycle
  • find statistics on who is reading your papers

Please be aware that any publications you upload to the site must adhere to the copyright and licensing agreements you have with your publisher. Talk to the library if you would like to know more about copyright, open access and self archiving.

 

 

  • ResearchGate is a free, easy to use and has a specific section for health researchers.

  • Academics use  Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. This is a free site that also has a dedicated health sciences section and a job board.

  • Semantic Scholar is a free, not for profit  site that provides excellent impact information. “Analyzes publications and extracts important features using machine learning techniques. The resulting influential citations, images and key phrases allow our engine to “cut through the clutter” and give you results that are more relevant and impactful to your work.”