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COBRA: Managing Your Scholarly Identity

This guide focuses on managing your academic presence, where we delve into the nuances of cultivating a distinguished scholarly persona.

How and Why to Optimize Your Scholarly Identity

As you begin to publish, scholarly profiling tools like Google Scholar, Scopus, and more automatically indexes published works under author's names. An analyses of scholarly profiles across multiple services "revealed that each of these services covered less than 50% of the authors’ publication activity" (Gasparyan et al., 2017, p.1753). Not only can managing your author profile through these services give you control over how your scholarly identity is presented but can also:

  • Allow you to add missing works to give a more complete picture of your portfolio
  • Update your current information and link your works together as you you move institutions, change names, etc.
  • Differentiate yourself from authors with the same name
  • Preserve and promote access to your scholarship 
  • Build networks to be more discoverable to potential collaborators
  • Increase visibility of your works through public profiles
  • Support important documentation, like a tenure dossier

A strong author profile should:

  • Support open access and be easily findable online
  • Link to your other author profiles, faculty profile, or professional social media accounts
  • Include an author photograph and other multimedia content
  • Contain your scholarly activity such as biographic notes, keywords, records of published items, peer reviewer activities, contributions at professional meetings, and other academic accomplishments
  • Provide access to an archive of pre-prints or open access editions of your scholarly work
  • Showcase author metrics including citation counts

Not all scholarly profile tools will have all the features mentioned above, which is why it may be necessary to manage to your scholarly identity across multiple tools to maintain a complete portfolio.

Examples of Websites for Creating Scholarly Profiles

Some scholarly profile tools can be complimentary. It can benefit a researcher to combine multiple platforms to manage their digital scholarly identity.​​​​​

 Website

URL

Main function

 ResearcherID

http://www.researcherid.com

Issuing unique identifiers for authors

 Google
 Scholar
 Citations

https://scholar.google.com/citations

Aggregating links to publications visible on Google, tracking citations, navigating to co-authors' profiles

 ORCID

https://orcid.org

Issuing unique identifiers for author and contributor name disambiguation

 Kudos

https://www.growkudos.com

Sharing publications, explaining their importance, measuring their citation-based and alternative impact, and managing scholarly reputation

 ScienceOpen

https://www.scienceopen.com

Scholarly social networking, gold open-access publishing, and post-publication peer review

 Publons

https://publons.com

Crediting peer review and editorial contributions

 arXiv

https://arxiv.org

Repository of electronic preprints

 Ideas

https://ideas.repec.org

A service of the Research Paper in Economics (RePEc) database for creating profiles and sharing links to articles

 ResearchGate

https://www.researchgate.net

Scholarly social networking, discussing and sharing publications

 Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu

Scholarly social networking, discussing and sharing publications

 Mendeley

http://www.mendeley.com

Reference management

 Zotero

http://www.zotero.com

Reference management

 Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org

Showcasing achievements and awards of eminent scholars

Chart adapted from: Gasparyan, A. Y., Nurmashev, B., Yessirkepov, M., Endovitskiy, D. A., Voronov, A. A., & Kitas, G. D. (2017). Researcher and author profiles: Opportunities, advantages, and limitations. Journal of Korean Medical Science32(11), 1749. https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2017.32.11.1749 

Exemplar - Elizabeth Price