What is online scholarly identity?
Accurately connecting researchers to their works and differentiating one scholar from another can be very difficult in the digital age. Such work is essential to the scholarly communications system, however, and the organizations that manage databases and research information systems have developed various means of authoritatively distinguishing the identity and output of different scholars.
Databases, indexes, and search engines like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar use algorithms to compile author profiles which list institutional affiliation and contact information alongside a list of works attributed to them. But these programs are not perfect and papers are often attributed to the wrong scholar of the same name. These profiles should be reviewed and maintained by the scholars themselves.
Scholars can also create and curate their online identity using standalone services like ORCiD. Obtaining an Open Researcher and Contributor ID enables a scholar to identify themselves and their work by a unique number which also serves as a link to their profile. In addition to scholarly publications and presentations, ORCiD profiles can provide information about a researcher's education, awards, employment history, and more. Visit the ORCiD website to learn more, or read their 2021 Annual Report.
Researcher profilers and identifiers
- arXiv Author Identifiers
"Since 2005 arXiv has used authority records that associate user accounts with articles authored by that user. These records support the endorsement system." - Google Scholar Profiles
"Google Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics." - Humanities Commons
Humanities Commons is a nonprofit network that enables humanities scholars and practitioners to create a professional profile, discuss common interests, develop new publications, and share their work. The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone, regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. - MathSciNet MR Author ID
"For each author a separate "author-individual" record is maintained in the MR Database, containing each published name variant associated with an author, institutional affiliations, mathematical subject classifications assigned to the author-individual's papers, coauthors, and references to papers indexed in the MR Database." - ORCiD
"ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities." - Scopus Author Profiles
"Each Scopus Author Profile is a unique record of that researcher’s publication activity. The details come from peer-reviewed articles and other publications that are indexed in Scopus ...where the researcher is specified as an author." - Semantic Scholar
Information on how to find and claim your Author Page as well as the role of the Semantic Scholar Author ID. - Web of Science ResearcherID
"Web of Science ResearcherID is a unique identifier for researchers on Publons, Web of Science, and InCites. Your personal ResearcherID is shown at the top-right of most pages on Publons, including your profile and your private dashboard."
Online Scholarly Identity: Profiles and Best Practices
Recording of a webinar offered by Prof. Chris Barnes on November 1, 2023.
Slides are viewable as a PDF file here.
Scholarly identity resources
- The Shady Margins of Open Access: Gray OA and Academic Social Network Sites (2022)From the abstract: "Academic Social Network Sites (ASNS) have grown to become a preeminent location for sharing full text scholarly research articles. This paper examines ASNS within the context of open access by suggesting that the framework of “gray open access” best describes ASNS as sites for the dissemination of published research. To understand why authors share their work on ASNS, this paper reviews library and information science literature..."
- Re(Casting) Call: Sculpting Services & Strategies for Cultivating Online Scholarly IdentitySlides from an excellent presentation on various aspects of online identity management for academics.
- “Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu (2017)From the abstract: "Drawing on Academia.edu’s corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site’s business model and (2) its social affordances. We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of “sharing.” In addition, the site’s fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring—one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact."
- ORCID & SciENcv TutorialThis video tutorial covers: What is ORCID? (0:48); How to add data to ORCID (3:47); How to connect ORCID with SciENcv for NIH Biosketch (13:03); How to connect ORCID with SciENcv for NSF Biosketch (17:01).
- ORCiD: Use the Search & Link Wizard to Import WorksFind out how and why to import works into your ORCID record from another system that has created an ORCID Search & Link wizard
Assessing and improving the impact of your work
- Measures of Impact for Journals, Articles, and Authors (2022)Recent overview of various impact metrics.
- Four reasons to stop caring so much about the h-index"The h-index attempts to measure the productivity and impact of the published work of scholar. But reducing scholarly work to a number in this way has significant limitations. Stacy Konkiel highlights four specific reasons the h-index fails to capture a complete picture of research impact. Furthermore, there are a variety of new altmetrics tools out there focusing on how to measure the influence of all of a researcher’s outputs, not just their papers."
- Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic ResearchHow the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. MIT Press, 2020.
- The Metrics ToolkitThe Metrics Toolkit provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where you can find it, and how each should (and should not) be applied. You’ll also find examples of how to use metrics in grant applications, CV, and promotion packages.
- ResponsibleMetrics.orgThis site aims to provide a forum for debating responsible uses of metrics in higher education & research. It builds on the UK’s Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management which published its final report The Metric Tide on 9 July 2015.
Measures of Influence for Authors
Source: Suelzer, E.M., Jackson, J.L. Measures of Impact for Journals, Articles, and Authors. J GEN INTERN MED (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-022-07475-8
