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Research Visibility: Managing Author Profiles

What is an Author Profile?

Multiple author identity systems have emerged in recent years which provide a unique identifier to disambiguate researchers and scholars from others with the same or similar name. These identifiers are persistent and portable, allowing use across multiple organizations and institutions.  For NIE researchers, we recommend exploring the following:

How does it benefit me?

  Increase the visibility and accessibility of your research output:

  • Publishers and funders often require authors to have a profile with ORCID.
  • Find collaborators outside your institution and across disciplines.

  Ensures that your work is correctly attributed to you:

  • Author identifiers are unique (i.e aims to solve the problem of name ambiguity of authors).
  • Links all name variants and formerly used names (e.g.  Mueller J., Muller J, Mueller, JR, Jörg Müller, Joerg Mueller, Jorg Muller). This reduces indexing errors that lead to missing or wrongly attributed papers in your publications list.

  Display citation metrics that demonstrate the impact of your research:

  • Used for career advancement and tenure. You may choose to make your profile public or private.
  • Citation metrics can be shown in ResearcherID, Scopus, and Google Scholar but not ORCID.

  Your profile can be used in the long-term even as you change between institutions.

Good Practices for Managing Author Profiles

Why do I need more than one author profile?

This is because the Google Scholar author profile, ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID and ORCID utilise different research metrics systems:

  • Google Scholar author profile tracks citation counts and author metrics from publications indexed in Google Scholar.
  • ResearcherID tracks citation counts and author metrics from publications indexed in Web of Science.
  • Scopus Author ID tracks citation counts and author metrics from publications indexed in Scopus.
  • ORCID does not provide metrics, but it facilitates updates or exchanges of data with many other systems to keep your publication data accurate and up-to-date.

For a comprehensive overview of your research impact and to increase your research visibility, we recommend having more than one author profile.