Establishing your scholarly identity online can be a helpful first step to increasing your scholarly impact. This chapter will outline several tools and methods you can use to start building your online scholarly identity. While you may not yet be an established scholar in your field, setting up your online academic profile early will make it easier to maintain as you progress throughout your career. As a graduate student, this is a great time to get started.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this chapter, you will be able to:

  • Create An ORCID Account, Google Scholar Profile, And/Or Other Research Platform Account
  • Develop A Plan To Establish A Positive Digital Footprint

What is the purpose of establishing an online scholarly identity?

  • To communicate with others in your field
  • To find collaborators interested in your area of research
  • To improve the quality of your work
  • To increase the discoverability of your work

Online Academic Profiles

Whether you create an academic profile, host your own online scholarly portfolio, utilize social media, or a combination of all of these options, your online presence has the potential to become part of your overall scholarly identity. Take charge of this presence early.

ORCID

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier to help distinguish between researchers. With a consolidated online research profile, scholarly contributions can be easily shared.

Step 1: Go to ORCID at http://www.orcid.org/

Step 2: Register for a free ORCID identifier. Remember to verify your email address to complete the registration process. If you would like to verify your affiliation with Fredonia, use your Fredonia email address.

Step 3: Begin building your ORCID record by filling out any relevant fields. It is also recommended that you include information about your other websites and social links. This gives you another layer of control over what pages are associated with you.

Google Scholar Profile

Google Scholar Profiles is a quick and easy solution for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and more for free. Making your profile public will allow your name to appear in the Google Scholar search results when someone searches for your name. Example: Emily Drabinski

 

Getting Started

  1. First, sign in to your Google account, or create one if you don’t yet have one. We recommend that you use a personal account, not an account at your institution so that you can keep your profile for as long as you wish.
  2. Once you’ve signed in to your Google account, open the Scholar profile sign-up form, confirm the spelling of your name, enter your affiliation, interests, etc. We recommend that you also enter your university email address; this would make your profile eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results.
  3. On the next page, you’ll see groups of articles written by people with names similar to yours. Add all articles that you have written; keep in mind your articles may be in several different groups, and some groups may occasionally include articles by several different authors. If you publish under several different names, you may need to do several searches to add all your articles.
  4. Once you’re done with adding articles, it will ask you what to do when the article data changes in Google Scholar. You can either have the updates applied to your profile automatically, or you can choose to review them beforehand. In either case, you can always go to your profile and make changes by hand.
  5. Finally, you will see your profile. This is a good time to add a few finishing touches – upload your professional-looking photo, visit your university email inbox and click on the verification link, double-check the list of articles, and, once you’re completely satisfied, make your profile public. Voila – it’s now eligible to appear in Google Scholar when someone searches for your name!

For additional set-up information: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html#setup

Other Popular Platforms

Academia.edu is a free social networking service that enables its users, including graduate students and academics, to create academic profile pages and to connect with other users around the world with similar research interests.

Mendeley functions as both an academic network and as a citation manager. It can be used to discover researchers and articles, and the ability to generate a citation using the integrated MS Word plugin.

Publons (previously ResearcherID) provides each researcher with a unique identifier. This enables researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author misidentification.

ResearchGate allows users to upload their publications (subject to copyright restrictions, see below), and make connections with others.

A note on sharing copies of your work online:

While some of these platforms encourage researchers to upload copies of their publications, it is important to keep in mind that authors often transfer their copyright to the publisher of their article and it may not be within their rights to distribute their own copies.

License

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Fredonia Graduate Studies Research Toolkit Copyright © 2022 by Christina Hilburger is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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