As a research active academic I publish papers and engage in other research activities that hopefully have some impact. Just what that impact is and how to measure it will be the subject of a later post – protip it’s altmetrics.
The first challenge however is to assemble a list of all my research outputs. Straightforward you say? Well perhaps, but precisely what is classed as a research output depends somewhat on the field you are in. For many of us the journal article is the most obvious output and therefore compiling a list of journal articles I’ve published has been my focus recently.
Actually I started thinking about this 6 years ago when I wrote about publicationlist.org. That was and remains a great site, simple to use and looks neat, but it requires some effort to gather together all your papers. A problem associated with this is just who am I, at least who am I in the research literature? I have appeared in print variously named as, ‘Davies D’, ‘Davies DA’, ‘Davies David’, ‘David Davies’, ‘D A Davies’, ‘D Davies’, and probably other combinations involving the different institutions I’ve worked at. They’re all me of course, but to a database they’re different people unless they can all be associated with a unique ID, the unique me.
Enter Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), Scopus Author ID, and ResearcherID, three initiatives aiming to uniquely identify each researcher from their fragmented publication profiles. Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID are backed by two of the biggest academic publishers, Elsevier and Thompson Reuters respectively, but ORCID is especially interesting as it’s an open, non-profit, and community-based effort. Thankfully all three systems talk to each other so you can link your Scopus and ResearcherID to your ORCID. And that’s what I’ve been doing over the holiday. I think I have now assembled a definitive list of my published outputs.
There are differences between the three schemes. ORCID is the simplest and just presents a list of outputs plus associated publication metadata. Useful for establishing my researcher profile on the web, but limited in functionality. ResearcherID is the most comprehensive because it uses Thompson Reuters’ Web of Knowledge and Web of Science to find not only peer reviewed journal articles but also conference proceedings, published poster abstracts and other works. Certainly more attractive for early careers researchers who have presented publishable work at conferences but have yet to build up an extensive journal profile. ResearcherID also has some high level citation metrics. Scopus however is likely to be the profile your institution is most interested in because it includes detailed citation metrics and analytics. It is also very useful for finding out who cites your work, so that you get a good idea of the active researchers in your field, as well as one measure of the impact of your work.
There are other differences that will become apparent when trying to gauge the impact of your research, especially when considering other factors such as who is talking about your work via social media. In that respect ORCID seems to be the preferred unique ID, probably because it’s an open non-profit initiative. It also plays well with the small but increasing number of altmetrics sites such as ImpactStory, but more about that if/when I write about altmetrics. But for now you might want to consider creating and maintaining all three profiles.
So anyway, if you want to check out my own research outputs then my researcher profiles are:
My ORCID
My ResearcherID
My Scopus Author ID
I’ve also just started using ImpactStory so if you want to see what impact I’m apparently having then head over to my ImpactStory profile.
But wait, that’s not all. There are some other interesting researcher profile services around. These are less about establishing a unique researcher ID, but instead are extremely useful for building a researcher profile on the web and creating a professional social network around researchers. The service that most of my colleagues seem to be taking up is ResearchGate. It’s very easy to use and looks slick. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet use any of the researcher IDs so there’s still a relatively long-winded method for finding all your papers, unless you import them as BibTex, EndNote or other equivalent format from ResearcherID for example.
Here’s my ResearchGate profile. Using the social networking features you can ‘follow’ me in a similar way to following people on Twitter.
If there are other research profile schemes or researcher networks that you find useful please mention them in the comments section below.