Tag Archives: academic social networks

What an ORCID iD Can Do For You

December 11, 2018Uncategorizedacademic communication, academic social networks, ORCID, research impact, scholarly publishing, Top NewsAnnie Johnson

Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash.

The following is a guest post written by Maria Aghazarian, Digital Resources and Scholarly Communications Specialist at Swarthmore College Libraries.

Chances are you already maintain some kind of scholarly presence online, whether that’s on your personal website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or somewhere else. But individually maintaining these profiles takes a lot of time and energy that could be better spent in other ways.

ORCID is a multidisciplinary not-for-profit organization that provides persistent numeric identifiers that can streamline the way you present your research online. It takes just 30 seconds to register for an ORCID identifier. ORCID iDs can save you time, help you distinguish yourself in your field, and boost the visibility of your research. How does one number do all that?

By adding your ORCID iD to the systems you already use, you can authorize automatic updates to your ORCID profile, and use it as a way to link together your already existing profiles. There are 61 publishers and 22 funders that require ORCID iDs during the submission or application process. When the work is published/complete, these organizations will push updates to your ORCID profile with the details of the work, so you don’t have to.

Don’t want to spend a lot of time manually adding all your publications? ORCID has 12 different wizards designed to help you add works to your ORCID profile in just minutes. If you already maintain a Google Scholar profile, you can easily export your citations as a BibTeX file and import that file into ORCID, populating your profile in one easy step.

ORCID isn’t just for traditional peer-reviewed publications, though–use it to present all of your scholarship. With 39 supported work types, including encyclopedia entries, magazine articles, newspaper articles, websites, working papers, conference papers, conference posters, patents, artistic performances, lectures, software, you can represent the full range of your scholarship with your ORCID iD. To round out your profile, add membership and service for organizations as well as invited positions and distinctions.

Unlike your email, your affiliation, or even your name, your ORCID iD will never change. Your iD is persistent throughout your career, from student scholar to tenured professor, making it easier for others to discover and read your works. It’s reliable no matter how your name appears in publication. Your number is unique to you, and can be used to distinguish yourself from researchers with similar names. You can also add variations to your name to your profile (“also known as”) if you have published under several names or nicknames.

When your ORCID iD appears on an article you’ve published, it links back to your profile, presenting interested readers with a reliable representation of your scholarly work, no matter where they’re coming from. Since your iD will never change, it’s a stable URL, unlike a personal websites which could change location with site reorganization.

Once you have your iD, you can use ORCID to market yourself. Link your education, employment, grant funding, publications, and more, like an interactive component of your CV. You can also link out to other pages such as your website or your Google Scholar page. When someone is looking to learn more about you and your work, you can direct them to your profile. You can even add a link to your profile in your email signature, CV, grad school applications, or generate a QR code to include in conference posters and presentations.

ORCID uses OAuth which means that it can act as a single sign-on for many different systems — leaving you with one less password to remember and a way to connect these siloed profiles and accounts together. You can securely register with your Temple credentials, or link your Temple account to your profile for even easier sign in. Since your account is not tied solely to your Temple credentials, you will be able to access your ORCID profile even if you graduate or leave the Temple community.

Temple University Libraries is proud to be an institutional member of ORCID.

Academic Social Networks: Google Scholar

June 27, 2017Uncategorizedacademic social networks, Google, research impact, Top NewsAnnie Johnson

“3D Social Networking” by Chris Potter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This is the third in a series of posts on academic social networks.

First launched in 2004, Google Scholar was created by former University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Anurag Acharya and engineer Alex Verstak. Although not a social network in the traditional sense, Google Scholar has become an important tool for finding and keeping up with the latest research, promoting one’s own work, and tracking scholarly impact. While Google does not release usage statistics, in a recent Springer Nature survey, 89% of respondents said they use Google Scholar in a professional capacity.

The social part of Google Scholar is pretty basic: you can “follow” researchers so that when they have a new article or citation you will get an email from Google. You can also set up alerts based on your own research interests. This can be useful when you want to know about the latest work being published in your field.

Many researchers use Google Scholar to help establish their scholarly credentials. Creating a Google Scholar Profile can help you raise your visibility as a scholar and make sure you’re getting credit for all of your publications. It’s easy to do, although it does take time to maintain. From the Google Scholar landing page, click on “My Citations.” Then simply fill out your name, affiliation, areas of interest, and provide a link to your personal or departmental website. [Note: You might want to sign up using your personal Gmail account, rather than your Temple.edu account, because if you leave Temple, you will lose access to your Google Scholar account.] Based on this information, Google will then show you a list of publications it thinks were written by you. If you have a common name, you’re likely to get a lot of publications you’ll need to weed through. That having been said, Google often doesn’t find everything, especially in the humanities. So, if some of your publications are missing, know that you can always add them yourself manually.

Going forward, you can choose to have Google automatically update your profile with new publications or you can have them send you an email first to get your approval. We recommend that you approve them first, as Google Scholar data is notoriously messy. However, if you do decide to let Google update them for you, check your profile regularly to make sure that Google hasn’t claimed a number of publications which aren’t yours. Once you’ve setup your profile, you can also add a photograph, verify your Temple affiliation, and add coauthors. Also make sure to set your profile to public!

Based on your publication data, Google will compile your total number of citations, your h-index score, and your i10-index score. These numbers are public and will be displayed unless you set your profile to private. You may not have heard of the i10-index. That’s because only Google Scholar uses it. It’s the number of publications with at least 10 citations. Another thing to note: Any articles you add manually will be included in your total number of citations, but not in your h-index score or your i10-index score.

While it can be tempting to take these metrics at face value it’s important not to. Google Scholar’s citation analysis is done by a computer, not a human. There is very little quality control. Especially if you are coming up for tenure it is more than worth it to take the time to compare your Google Scholar metrics to what you can find in Web of Science and Scopus. We also recommend doing your own research on your scholarly impact.

Do you use Google Scholar? What do you like or dislike about it?

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Academic Social Networks: ResearchGate

July 6, 2016Uncategorizedacademic social networks, scholarly publishingAnnie Johnson

“3D Social Networking” by Chris Potter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This is the second in a series of posts on academic social networks. Our first post was on Academia.edu.

Based in Germany, ResearchGate is a platform that enables researchers to connect with others and share their work. The company was co-founded in 2008 by Ijad Madisch, a PhD in virology. Madisch is also the current CEO. Since it started, ResearchGate has raised millions of dollars in venture capital money from a number of high profile firms and individuals, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Originally, only scientists were able to join ResearchGate. Now, anyone can sign up, but the platform caters to academic researchers, corporate researchers, and medical professionals. ResearchGate claims to have over 9 million users, although it is not known how many of those use the platform regularly. According to one recent survey, two thirds of respondents noted that they are active users of ResearchGate.

Like its competitor Academia.edu, ResearchGate allows users to post full-text versions of their publications to their profile, or they can enable other scholars to contact them privately to get a copy. Users can even generate their own DOIs (digital objects identifiers) for work they post. The platform also hosts question and answer forums and a job board. One interesting feature of ResearchGate is its Open Review. Open Review lets users write a review of any publication on ResearchGate (whether the full text has been posted or not).

Before signing up for ResearchGate, it’s important to know that some scholars have complained about how aggressive the company is when it comes to marketing. ResearchGate has been known to spam users and users’ co-authors. The company has also been accused of setting up fake profiles for scholars who never registered for an account, and posting articles without authors’ permission.

As ResearchGate is a private company, many scholars have started wondering what the platform will do once its venture funding runs out. Madisch has said in the past that ResearchGate will not sell researcher’s data. According to a recent article in Times Higher Education, Madisch believes that the company will be able to become profitable through advertising alone. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen.

Academic Social Networks: Academia.edu

April 29, 2016Uncategorizedacademic social networks, copyright, scholarly publishing, Top NewsAnnie Johnson

“3D Social Networking” by Chris Potter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This is the first in a series of posts on academic social networks.

Academia.edu is a platform for sharing, reading, and discussing scholarly work. The company was founded in 2008 by Richard Price, a philosophy DPhil who left the academy to become an entrepreneur. Despite its confusing URL, Academia.edu is a commercial company. Thus far, they have raised an impressive 17.7 million dollars in venture funding. The site is completely free to join and use. While the company makes some money from selling ads, they are still looking for a sustainable business model.

To date, over 36 million academics from around the world have registered an account on Academia.edu. While this number is impressive, it is hard to know how many of those who registered actively use the site. Researchers join Academia.edu for a number of different reasons. The platform helps scholars reach larger audiences. Scholars can upload articles, dissertations, conference papers, as well as a variety of other published and unpublished work to the platform. Anyone, regardless of their university affiliation (or lack thereof), can access what is posted. Academia.edu then provides researchers with metrics on who is reading their scholarship. In addition, the site makes it easy to keep up with others who are writing on similar topics (alerting the user when a new article related to one’s research interests is posted). Some people even use the platform as a home for their scholarly profile. Researchers can add their CV and link to various social media accounts. The company is also experimenting with a number of additional features, such as something they call “Sessions,” in which a group of users gets together in a chat room to peer review a paper. The event is private and only those participating can see comments from other users. The idea is that through “Sessions,” academics can get useful feedback on their work from dozens of peers, similar to what they might experience at an academic conference.

While there are many reasons to join Academia.edu, there are also reasons to proceed with caution. First, researchers who post copies of work in which they do not own the copyright run the risk of getting in trouble with publishers. In 2013, Elsevier sent take-down requests to thousands of Academia.edu users who had illegally shared copies of their scholarship. These take-down requests eventually stopped, although it is not clear why. Some say Elsevier did not want to anger academics (who the company relies on to write articles and provide peer review). However, it is important to note that individual journals (such as the William and Mary Quarterly), continue to send take-down notices to users. We recommend that all Temple users of Academia.edu check their publication agreements before posting work to the site.

Second, there are a lot of unanswered questions about what changes the company will have to make in order to turn a profit and satisfy investors. Recently, University of Oklahoma Professor Scott F. Johnson got an e-mail from an Academia.edu staff member asking if he would be willing to pay a fee to have his work recommended by an Academia.edu board of editors. Although the idea was not actually implemented by Academia.edu, it got academics thinking about how the company is trying to monetize scholarly work. A number of prominent scholars, including Kathleen Fitzpatrick from the Modern Language Association and Martin Paul Eve at the University of London, have called for scholars to delete their accounts or at least use multiple platforms. There is even a #DeleteAcademiaEdu hashtag.

One final point to remember about Academia.edu is that it is not a good means of preserving scholarly work. We have no idea if the company will even exist five, ten, or twenty years from now. So, researchers who are concerned with the long-term preservation of their scholarship should also make sure to deposit their work in a trusted, discipline-specific repository, such as ArXiv, which is funded by Cornell University, the Simons Foundation, and various member institutions (including Temple University Libraries).

Do you use Academia.edu? What do you like or dislike about it?