Manage your identity and maximize your impact

Here are some of the positive steps you can take to increase your online visibility, grow your professional network, and increase the impact of your work.

First, sign up for an ORCID account.

• ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, and not-for-profit organization that provides a robust and universal researcher profile system. ORCID enables transparent and trustworthy connections between your research and your affiliations by providing a unique identifier for you to use with your name as you engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Institutions, funders, and publishers are increasingly adopting ORCID into their workflow, application, and submission processes.

Next, consider which collaboration network or profile system is best for you. Popular academic and professional social networks that provide platforms for you to create and manage a profile include:

• Academia.edu
• ResearchGate
• LinkedIn
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
• Mendeley
• Humanities Common (network for humanists)

Academic social networks allow you to share, collaborate, connect, and get analytics and rankings about the impact and reach of your work and the work of others in your field. Most of these platforms are for-profit businesses. They are all free to join; but be aware that when you add content to them, they may be mined and used in ways you did not intend.

Before you join an academic social network, consider:

• What academic social networks are used by researchers in your field?
• What social networks have active user communities in your field?
• How do you want to separate your personal and professional profiles and online identities?
• What is your comfort level with the privacy policies of various online platforms?
• Do you have ethical concerns about the for-profit status or business model of the platform owner?
• Do you have concerns about the data sharing or ownership policies of the online platform?

Wikipedia publishes a comparison of research networking tools and research profiling systems.

Most important first steps:

Immediately:

• Register for an ORCID account
• Make a conscious decision about using ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or other academic social networking sites. For some assessments of these sites, see:
  • A Social Networking Site is not an Open Access Repository (Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California)
  • Metrics Mania: The Case Against Academia.edu (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
  • The ResearchGate Score: A Good Example of a Bad Metric (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  • One More Word about ResearchGate/Academia.edu and Why Using These Platforms Will Never Be Equal to Proper Self-archiving (DARIAH Open)
  • Do Academic Social Networks Share Academics' Interests? (Times Higher Education)
  • Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu? (Centre for Disruptive Media)
  • Academia, not Edu (Planned Obsolescence)

After your first publications:

• Claim Your Google Scholar Profile
  • Setting up your Google Scholar Profile

If you author or edit a book:

• Claim Your Amazon Author Profile

Additionally you can:

• Get a ResearcherID in Web of Science
  • A ResearcherID can be linked to your ORCID account and facilitates citation metrics and publication tracking using Web of Science tools
• Manage your Scopus Author Identifier
  • The Scopus Author Identifier disambiguates authors and can be linked to your ORCID account

Other tools/resources you can use to share your work and promote your scholarly profile:

• Metrics Toolkit
  • Resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact
• Kudos
  • Cloud-based platform that helps you to increase engagement with and impact of your research
• Impactstory
  • Open-source website that helps researchers explore and share the online impact of their research
• Publish or Perish
  • Software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations
• PLoS Article Level Metrics
  • Authors of PLoS articles can get citation, usage, and social media data
• Ten Simple Rules for Innovative Dissemination of Research
• Ten Tips for Tweeting Research