Academic Profiles

In today's scholarly communication environment, your online presence as a researcher is becoming increasingly important. Your online identity may be composed of many different systems and platforms which you may benefit from interlinking.

Your online presence can play an important role in:

• Promoting your teaching and research activity
• Making you more visible and therefore more likely to be cited
• Ensuring that you get credit for your work and that all your work is associated with you (and not someone else with the same or similar name)
• Finding new collaborators and funding sources
• Making yourself available as an expert to contribute to projects, policies or news media.

There are many different platforms available, some more important than others depending on your discipline, career level and research goals.

Online Profiles: General tips

• Add photos where you can, especially when they depict you carrying out work
• It is much better to have fewer profiles that are well formed than to try and sign up for everything and then leave them empty or let them get out of date
• Interlink your profiles wherever possible
• Revisit your profiles regularly to check they are current and to engage with other users
• If you're not sure which platforms are best, talk to your colleagues and find out what profiles are used by researchers you admire

Name Disambiguation

Name ambiguity can be particularly problematic for people with very common names, or whose names have changed over the course of their career. If your work is being mistakenly associated with someone else, this may negatively effect your research metrics. The video below from Yale University explains why name disambiguation is important.

Enhancing research impact: Name disambiguation - Yale University

Platforms

IRIS

IRIS is the University's Research Information Management System. It is used to collect, understand and showcase scholarly activities such as publications and grants. Only staff will have an IRIS profile. For further information see the IRIS help pages.

ORCID

ORCID is a key tool used to pull all your research activity together under a permanent identifier. For more information see our ORCID page.

Scopus

Scopus is a large indexing database - its main purpose is to curate high-quality scholarly material and count citations. If you author or co-author a piece of research that is indexed in Scopus, a ScopusID will be assigned to you along with an associated profile. If you have work indexed in Scopus, it is very important to check that it is correctly attributed to you and associated with your ID. This can be done by yourself or with the help of the Open Research Team by emailing [email protected]

Google Scholar profile

You can easily create your own Google Scholar profile and "claim" any publications found therein. This will then show up when people search your name or click on your publications. Like Scopus and Web of Science, it counts citations and provides statistics including your h-index. Note that you might find a higher number of citations reflected in Google Scholar than elsewhere. This is because databases such as Scopus and Web of Science count citations only for publications they index, and they index selectively. Google Scholar, by contrast, counts all citations it can find.

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is an online academic network. It can be used to share research, as well as to connect to other researchers and follow their work, while they, in turn, can follow yours. You can also monitor analytics such as the number of times your profile or documents are viewed.

ResearchGate

ResearchGate is an online academic network similar to Academia.edu. Like Academia.edu, you can share your work and follow other researchers. You can also ask questions to the community, browse jobs and share updates on your projects.

For more information on how to engage with these platforms, see our Profiles Checklist.