Managing your identity
Managing your identity helps you to ensure that your work is unambiguously attributed to you and can help to raise your researcher profile.
A key thing to do is to create an ORCID iD. This is a unique identifier which:
Find out more on the Library’s pages about ORCID.
If your work appears in Web of Science you can create a Researcher ID. This is a unique profile in Web of Science which links to your publications. You can also link your Researcher ID with your ORCID ID.
If your work appears in Scopus, you will have a Scopus Author Identifier. This helps to identify and pull together your work in Scopus. It can be linked with your ORCID ID to help you to maintain your record.
Find out more from the Scopus page Manage my author profile
If you are new to publishing you should think about the name you use on your outputs so that your work can be attributed to you.
Your profile(s) are your shop window to the world. Consider where you would like to have a presence and remember to maintain your profiles on the services you have decided to use.
If you are a member of staff, your outputs on the SHU Institutional Repository SHURA are used to populate your SHU profile on the University’s externally facing web pages. It is therefore important to keep the record of your outputs up to date. You also need to do this to increase their visibility and ensure you are complying with requirements from SHU, HEFCE and funders.
You may also wish to create profiles and publication lists in social networking services for researchers such as ResearchGate or Academia. If you are thinking of using these sites, please have a look at our page about depositing your research outputs on social networking sites.
You may also wish to use Kudos to explain and share your work to a wider audience. If you already have an ORCID ID with your list of your publications, you can connect this with Kudos.
Another option is to set up a Google Scholar profile using Google Scholar Citations. You can create a public or private profile in Google Scholar with information about you and links to your publications.
If any of your publications are retrievable on Microsoft Academic you will automatically have a profile. Search for yourself to find and then claim your profile if you wish to edit and maintain it.
There are many other tools and sites you could consider using to raise your researcher profile and build a social media network, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Mendeley, etc. Investigate your options and consider carefully where you would like to invest your time and effort.
Measuring your academic impact
There are a various ways that you can measure and track the academic impact of your research outputs. Metrics that help you to do this fall into the categories of citation metrics and altmetrics.
Citation metrics
Citations have traditionally been seen as an indication that the cited work is being used to advance the research of others and can therefore be considered an indication of impact. Arguably, they could be more appropriately seen as an indication of academic attention.
Altmetrics
In the last few years altmetrics have become available. These are measures of article views & downloads, social media mentions, news mentions and captures & shares on tools such as Mendeley. Altmetrics can help toward measuring attention before citations are likely to happen and can give a wider picture beyond the academic literature. Use them to help build a ‘story’ around the reach of your outputs, alongside citation metrics and other measures of impact.
Responsible use of metrics in research analysis
It is important to understand the limitations of any metrics you use and to use them for appropriate purposes. For example:
You may want to read the Library Research Support Team’s approach to the responsible use of metrics advice and to consider the advice in the Leiden Manifesto and the Metric Tide report (pgs 134-5).
You may find the short video below useful. It describes 10 principles to guide the use of metrics in research evaluation and is a video version of the Nature paper:
Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijke, S. & Rafols I. (2015). The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics: use these 10 principles to guide research evaluation. Nature, April 23, 520:429-431. doi:10.1038/520429a.