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Researcher Profiles: Researcher Profile

ORCID, ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, Google Scholar Citation

What is a Researcher Profile?

Your researcher profile is an individual Internet profile that provides a user firendly and efficient way of showcasing your work. 

Having a unique profile:

  • Showcases your work to the world
  • Manages your publications list
  • helps to beidentified by potential collaborators
  • helps to avoid misidentification
  • Enables your research output to be attributed to Stirling
  • Tracks citation counts
  • Enhances your Stirling researcher profile page by including a link to other profiles

Why create Researcher Profile?

Unique author identifiers are useful for the following reasons:

  1. Researchers want to find potential collaborators, and want an easier way to get credit for their scholarly activities
  2. Institutions want to collect, showcase and evaluate the scholarly activities of their faculty
  3. Publishers want to simplify the publishing workflow, including peer review
  4. Funding organizations want to simplify the grant submission workflow and want to track what happened to the research they funded
  5. Scholarly societies want an easier way to track the achievements of their members

How does a Researcher Profile help you

In an increasingly competitive research and scholarship environment, how do you distinguish yourself from someone? If your institutional affiliation and/or contact information changes, how is the link between you and your scholarly work maintained? The solution is creating a researcher profile.

A profile pulls all your research and publications together in one place, mitigating common problems that often arise in searching.  Such problems can include variations in authors' names or difficulty in narrowing a search down easily when an author has a common name.

If a researcher has worked with multiple granting agencies, research groups, or institutions, a research profile will also make their research easier to find.

Researcher Profile Tools

  • ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers.  The ORCID Registry is available free of charge to individuals, who may obtain an ORCID, manage their record of activities, and search for others in the Registry.  Researchers can import their existing publications indexed in Web of Science and Scopus to their ORCID ID via the "Import Research Activities" link in their ORCID record. Publications can also be added using a DOI (Crossref, DataCite and mEDRA only), a PubMedID or ArXiv ID.

 

  • ResearcherID (Web of Science)
    Create and manage a professional profile, build an online publication list, measure performance with cited counts and h-index. Your profile can incorporate data and metrics from Web of Knowledge and from other sources.

 

  • Scopus: Author Identifier 

    Scopus Author ID is automatically generated if you have a paper in the database so registration for a Scopus Author ID is not required.

    Having a Scopus Author ID allows you to easily see a list of your publications and view citation metrics such as h-index measures, citation counts, publications and co-authors.Scopus Author ID can be linked to ORCID so publications can be imported into your ORCID.  Conduct an Author Search on your name and your affiliation e.g. University of Stirling. Did you find a record for yourself?  If you did, make a note of your Author ID so that you can add this to your ORCID profile. You can also get citation alerts and request corrections of your details in Scopus using this ID number. 

 

Comparison of Different Academic Profiling Services

TABLE 1: COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT ACADEMIC PROFILING SERVICES

SERVICE Advantages Disadvantages
Google Scholar Citations
  •  Widest coverage: all languages, sources, discipline and document types (>170 Million documents in Google Scholar, from which it feeds)
  • High Growth Rate
  • Number of citations three times larger than ResearchGate, four times larger than ResearcherID
  • Diverse audience: researchers, practitioners, scholars and general users
  • Automatic updates
  • Metrics: simple and easy to understand
  • User-friendly
  • Alerts (new citations and publications of any profile)
  • Scarce quality control
  • Open to manipulation. Hard to discover, and easy to influence metrics
  • Inherits bibliographic mistakes from Google Scholar
  • Lack of transparency about data source (size and coverage)
ResearcherID
  • Top quality control: peer reviewed publications
  • Audience selected and filtered: researchers
  • Hard to manipulate
  • Offers advanced bibliometric indicators

 

  • Its document base if the Web of Science Core Collection.  Therefore biased towards the English/American world (countries and languages) as well as towards the hard sciences to the detriment of Social Sciences and Humanities
  • Not used by many authors
  • Low growth rate
  • No automatic updates: most profiles empty or outdated
  • Not very user friendly
  • Metrics limited to citation metrics
ResearchGate
  • Very high growth rate
  • Wide Size (80 million bibliographic references) currently wider that WOSCC (62 million) and Scopus (61 million)
  • Increasingly used byscientific community, with stron presence of biomedical comunity
  • All document types covered: books, articles, proceedings, reports, thesis, etc.
  • Diverse audience: researchers, practitioners, scholars, and general users
  • Offers usage data (views and downloads)
  • User-friendly
  • Social functions to contact authors
  • Possibility to mint DOI for unpublished data at no cost to the user
  • Easy and fast publication, and immediate visibility
  • No automatic updates (a co-author must upload the document)
  • Lack of transparency in its indicators
  • Open to manipulation.  Easy to discover and hard to influence RG score
  • Still not used by many authors
  • Sends too many emails (by default).  Aggressive marketing policies and e-mail bombing
Mendeley Profiles
  • Excellent bibliographic reference manager
  • Increasingly used by community, especially by students and university teachers
  • All document types covered: books, articles, proceedings, reports, thesis, etc.
  • Audience: students and teachers
  • Offers usage data (reads)
  • Statistics: by discipline, country, academic reader status...
  • Allows discipline analyses
  • Social functions (i.e., follow other authors)
  • It draws upon Mendeley's own document database (31.8 Million documents)
  • Many profiles are empty or outdated
  • No automatic updates
  • Easy to manipulate (i.e.reads)
  • Opaque to academic search engine indexation
  • NO citation data provided
  • Quality of metadata depends upon user input
Table from Alberto Martin-Martin, Enrique Orduna-Malea and Emilio Delgado Lopez-Cozar. (2016)   "The role of ego in academic profile services: Comparing Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley and ResearcherID" http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/04/academic-profile-services-many-mirrors-and-faces-for-a-single-ego/