Academic Researcher Profiles

Profiles

Google Scholar Citations profile is part of Google Scholar and can be created with a Gmail account. We recommend you use a private email address to ensure you maintain durable access to your profile.

What are the benefits for researchers?

• If you make your Google Scholar Citation profile public, it appears at the top of Google Scholar results when people search for your name.
• It allows you to keep track of citations to your articles with a graph over time.
• You can see who is citing your outputs and you have the possibility to get alerts whenever your work is cited.

Keep in mind: 

• Google Scholar Citations Profile is not a unique persistent identifier (PDI)
• It can be considered as a way to showcase your publications. Don't forget that Google Scholar is the top research starting point for most scholars.
• It has a wide coverage, Google Scholar crawls the web for academic content. This has its limits (for example it duplicates entries for the same article)
• It can automatically keep your profile up to date, but Google Scholar sometimes suggests articles written by people with similar names. You also have the possibility to review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles.

(Kudos)

Kudos is  an open web-based platform, which helps maximize the visibility of your academic journal articles and track their impact.  (Kudos is a private company founded in 2013 by a group of publishing professionals).

Kudos is not a researcher profile, but a free platform for researchers where you can tell the story of your research once it has been published, to promote it and evaluate its impact.

What are the benefits for researchers?

• Kudos is a place where you can explain your work easily, you can enrich it by adding links to other materials and share it.  Please note that it is not possible to add preprints to the platform, but only officially published articles with DOI.
• once you shared the link, you can consult a dashboard that enables you to understand how and where to talk about your publications. Kudos allows you to decipher which communication channel is providing the most effective metrics (number of citations extracted from Web of Science, number shares on Twitter, number of full-text downloads, etc). Those metrics can only be consulted by the researcher. 

Keep in Mind

• Kudos is a promotion tool for academic journal articles with DOI. On Kudos, you do not add the full text itself, but the link to the article.
• the audience can be within and outside the scientific community.
• to save time with Kudos, you can import your publication list from ORCID. 
• the basic Kudos service is free for researchers.

(Social Science Research Network)

• Partially free access subject repository specialized in the Social Sciences (mainly business, economics, and law).
• It was considered as partially open access, because most papers referenced on the database were freely downloadable as full text and because it was not commercial, but it has been acquired by the company Elsevier in 2016.
• It requires online registration to upload your papers, but browsing the database is free.

What are the benefits for the researchers?

• Increase your visibility: once you upload your paper, it will be accessible worldwide through three channels: the SSRN e-library, which is well-known in the fields of economics and law; Google, which indexes this repository; and through alerts sent to users.
•  The author home page you create when you submit your papers is also a showcase of your research.
• Stay updated on your research field as you receive automatic updates of new publications when you subscribe to an e-journal in a specific field. When you deposit your work, you can choose to include it on several subject-based series or e-journals, which means that all the subscribers of those e-journals will receive an email with a list of new publications, including your work. Please note that not all e-journals are free to subscribe to.  
• Follow the attention given to your research using its metrics: views, downloads, citations on SSRN, on the web and other online attention metrics such as shares on Twitter, or mentions in the media. There is also a list of top papers and top authors based on the number of downloads and citations on the platform.

Keep in Mind

• Elsevier acquired SSRN in 2016, which implies that a new business model will be developed.
• There are other subject repositories not following a business model, such as REPEC (Research Papers in Economics) for economics and SocArxiv for the social sciences. REPEC is better known and more developed than SocArxiv, which started hosting pre-print articles in July 2016.
•  Do not forget that to submit a paper to SSRN you need permission from the copyright holder. Read your contract, consult the Sherpa database and if you still have doubts, contact your publisher or SSRN.