Manage your online researcher profiles
Having and maintaining an online presence brings many benefits for researchers. These include:
- Showcasing your work inside and outside academia.
- Managing your publications list.
- Avoiding misidentification and ensuring your achievements are correctly attributed to you.
- Opening up new connections and collaborations.
- Increasing visibility of your research and the chances of it being cited (research impact).
To increase the reach and impact of your research both within and outside of academia it’s important to think about other communication routes. Social media, for example Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and blogs, provide routes to reach a diverse and wide audience. For more information get in touch with External Relations or your Faculty Marketing contact.
Researcher profile tools
There are a number of researcher profile tools but, whichever ones you use, please check them periodically to see if they are up to date.
To learn more about researcher profile tools, book on to the next Managing Your Online Research Profile training session or view the session materials.
Read our
ORCID page or attend our
Making the Most of ORCID training to find out about creating an ORCID iD and populating your ORCID profile. It’s really easy to transfer in outputs from other resources and set it to automatically update when your new outputs get published.
Authors are automatically assigned an ID when they publish in a journal indexed by Scopus. The Scopus Author ID is matched to author names based on their affiliation, address, subject area, source title, dates of publication and co-authors. This enables Scopus to collate together the research outputs for an author and create an author profile. To increase the impact of your research, we advise taking the following steps:
- Check your Scopus Author Profile to ensure all your publications have been correctly affiliated to you and only one author profile exists for you. This will ensure the correct citation data is linked to your research outputs. (Scopus data is used in some of the university rankings).
- To find your Scopus Author Profile, you will need to access Scopus, choose the ‘Authors’ search tab and enter your details (you may need to enter affiliation details too if there are multiple entries for your name). Click on your name and it will show your profile.
- If there are multiple profiles for you, follow the Request to merge authors process. You will need an Elsevier account to complete this process.
- To increase the discoverability of your research, find out how to connect your ORCID iD to your Scopus Author Profile. This will also ensure any new publications will be correctly assigned to your Author Profile.
- Don't forget you can automatically add publications from your Scopus Author Profile to your ORCID profile.
- Email the Research Support team if you need help merging or updating your Author Profile in Scopus.
A Google Scholar profile is an easy way of collating your research outputs and associated citations so that others can find your work. If you create and make your Google Scholar profile public, your profile will come high up the page rankings if people are searching for your work.
Google Scholar covers a wide range of different types of research output and so may work better than other profile tools for researchers in arts, humanities and social sciences. You may find that Google Scholar shows a higher number of citations than other tools: this might be because it has wider coverage and also includes the different versions of research articles.
Setting up a Google Scholar Profile
It’s quick and easy to create, but you’ll need a Google account before you can begin - use your existing account or create one. It’s best to use a personal account so it can transfer with you if you move institution.
- Go to Google Scholar and click on 'My citations'
- Follow the instructions, adding your affiliation information and your University email address. (Remember to validate the address - you'll receive an email asking you to do this)
- Follow the prompts to add publications that are yours.
- Choose between automatic updates (new articles are automatically added to your profile) or if you want to receive an email to review and confirm updates.
- Make your profile public if you want other people to be able to view it.
For more information and help see the Google Scholar help guide.
Publons / Web of Science ResearcherID
Publons is the peer review activity tracker and researcher profile solution developed by Clarivate Analytics, the owners of Web of Science.
You can use Publons to manage your publication list, track citations to your work and manage your Web of Science record (using your ResearcherID), as well as recording your work as a peer reviewer.
To register for a Publons account:
- Go to the Publons website
- Click the REGISTER button (top right-hand corner)
- Enter your email address, name and a password, and a registration invitation link will be emailed to you.
After registering with Publons you will receive a Web of Science ResearcherID.
You can link Publons with your ORCID iD to easily export your publication list and verified peer review records from Publons to ORCID.
The Research Information System (RIS) is linked to the University’s HR system and automatically creates a Profile for all members of staff. The profile contains some basic information.
You can edit/update your profile to add ORCID ID and other researcher IDs like Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID.
Your research outputs that are in RIS are visible under the Outputs tab: they are also publicly visible in the University’s Research Repository and on the Publications in RIS Repository tab of your eStaff Profile webpage.
Please read the UoN RIS Profiles Guide (login required) for further information.
This University-developed tool enables you to promote your research and publications on the University website. Users control where and how their information appears by attaching their profile to a faculty, school, division and/or research group.
eStaff Profile displays information about your research and teaching expertise, publications, professional memberships, and personal details.
Currently the staff profile page displays two tabs: Publications; and Publications in RIS Repository. This is an interim solution and the plan is to have a single tab showing the full list of research outputs. At this time, no new developments for eStaff Profile are planned.
Social and professional networking sites
There are a number of academic social and professional networking sites that enable you to create a profile and use it to share your research interests, list your publications and interact with fellow researchers.
Many of these are commercial sites and it is important to check the copyright position before posting research articles on these sites.
- ResearchGate - Network with a focus on science.
- Academia.edu - Network with a focus on arts, humanities and social sciences.
- Humanities Commons - Non profit with a digital humanities focus, incorporates blog functionality and CORE repository.
- LinkedIn - Build a professional network beyond academia, useful when looking for jobs, consulting and knowledge exchange opportunities.
- The Conversation - An alternative way to openly promote your research might be to write an article for The Conversation, a not-for-profit platform that publishes news stories and research reports with accompanying expert opinion and analysis by academics and researchers.