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Academic Researcher Profiles

An overview of several researcher profiles

Summary

This table summarizes the main features of some tools to create author profiles:

 

ORCID

(2012)

 

(2008)
 

                 

 

 

(1994)

 

Scholar Citations Profile

(2012)

 

(2013)

Persistent  unique identifier

Yes

No

No

No

No

Business model

Open (not-for-profit)

Academia (For profit)

Elsevier
(since 2016)

Google

Kudos

Metrics

No

profile views

document views

author rank and paper rank

citations

downloads

views

other altmetric indicators provided by PLumX

paper and author ranks

citations (p year/article)

h-index

hi 10 index

 

citations (WoS)

article views (publ.)

downloads (publ.)

shares (Kudos)

Kudos views 

Altmetric

Monitoring
 
 

No

Yes (subjects, authors)

Yes (subjects)

Yes (citations, authors, subjects)

No
 

 

Automatically updated

Yes (via CrossRef, Datacite,  Publons) 

No

No

Yes

Possibility to import publication from 

Type of information

More than 40 supported work types

Mostly preprint
 
 

Preprint

Not transparent about the coverage (a lot of non reviewed content)

Article, book or book chapter with DOI

 

 

 

Recommandations

Keep in mind: 

Author profiles are a way to improve your visibility and discoverability:

  • to be correctly identified, we suggest you create an ORCID ID
  • to tell others what you are working on
  • to apply for a job, a grant or to submit a paper to a publisher

Only share information that you can legally disclose to others:

  • before choosing an Author profile, check the terms and conditions of use
  • before publishing your documents,  check the copyright policies of the publisher using Sherpa.

Be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each tool:

To choose a researcher profile think about who you want to reach to choose the type of researcher profile you need. To do this, you can ask yourself some questions, like:

  • who is the owner of the tool?
  • is it open source or commercial
  • is there any possibility to upload the full text or not?
  • does it provide metrics (number of views, downloads, citations, etc)?
  • which discipline is most represented
  • is there a possibility to auto-update your publication’s list?

Storage and preservation are not always guaranteed overtime.

As the durability of storage is not ensured in the commercial platforms, an alternative is to use our  Institutional repository. If you have a contract with the Geneva Graduate Institute as a researcher and if you want to be sure your publications are preserved, you can send the results of your research to Catherine Brendow who will reference your work on the Institutional Repository. For more information about Institutional Repository, please read this blog post and this guide.

All these tools can be complementary

  • instead of choosing only one platform, we suggest you to be active on several of them
  • if you decide to have many profiles, remember that most of those profiles can be linked together. 
  • if you choose to be everywhere, don’t forget to keep your profiles up-to-date so that people can follow your activities.
  • you can consider your profiles as a personal brand to communicate about who you are and what you’re working on, but try to be selective in what you put on your profiles.

References