Establishing your scholarly identity online can be a helpful first step to increasing your scholarly impact. This chapter will outline several tools and methods you can use to start building your online scholarly identity. While you may not yet be an established scholar in your field, setting up your online academic profile early will make it easier to maintain as you progress throughout your career. As a graduate student, this is a great time to get started.

What is the purpose of establishing an online scholarly identity?

• To communicate with others in your field
• To find collaborators interested in your area of research
• To improve the quality of your work
• To increase the discoverability of your work

Online Academic Profiles

Whether you create an academic profile, host your own online scholarly portfolio, utilize social media, or a combination of all of these options, your online presence has the potential to become part of your overall scholarly identity. Take charge of this presence early.

ORCID

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier to help distinguish between researchers. With a consolidated online research profile, scholarly contributions can be easily shared.

Step 1: Go to ORCID at http://www.orcid.org/

Step 2: Register for a free ORCID identifier. Remember to verify your email address to complete the registration process. If you would like to verify your affiliation with Fredonia, use your Fredonia email address.

Step 3: Begin building your ORCID record by filling out any relevant fields. It is also recommended that you include information about your other websites and social links. This gives you another layer of control over what pages are associated with you.

Google Scholar Profile

Google Scholar Profiles is a quick and easy solution for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and more for free. Making your profile public will allow your name to appear in the Google Scholar search results when someone searches for your name. Example: Emily Drabinski

Academia.edu is a free social networking service that enables its users, including graduate students and academics, to create academic profile pages and to connect with other users around the world with similar research interests.

Mendeley functions as both an academic network and as a citation manager. It can be used to discover researchers and articles, and the ability to generate a citation using the integrated MS Word plugin.

Publons (previously ResearcherID) provides each researcher with a unique identifier. This enables researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author misidentification.

ResearchGate allows users to upload their publications (subject to copyright restrictions, see below), and make connections with others.

A note on sharing copies of your work online:

While some of these platforms encourage researchers to upload copies of their publications, it is important to keep in mind that authors often transfer their copyright to the publisher of their article and it may not be within their rights to distribute their own copies.

Managing Your Digital Footprint

Publishing a blog and posting social updates are another popular ways to expand your digital footprint. Every tweet you post on Twitter, every status update you publish on Facebook, and every photo you share on Instagram contributes to your digital footprint. The more you spend time on social media websites, the larger your digital footprint will be. Even “liking” a page or a Facebook post adds to your digital footprint, since the data is saved on Facebook’s servers.

Everyone who uses the Internet has a digital footprint, so it is not something to be worried about. However, it is wise to consider what trail of data you are leaving behind. For example, remembering your digital footprint may prevent you from sending a scathing email, since the message might remain online forever. It may also lead you to be more discerning in what you publish on social media websites. While you can often delete content from social media sites, once digital data has been shared online, there is no guarantee you will ever be able to remove it from the Internet.”

While we often talk about cleaning up your digital footprint (traces of data you create online), as a graduate student, you may want to start thinking about cultivating your digital footprint in such a way that you want to be presented to your scholarly community.

Research Impact Measures

Research impact is often measured using quantitative methods such as citation counts, the h-index, and journal impact factors. It can also be described qualitatively. Currently, there is no one tool or system that completely measures impact. Each database or tool uses its own measurement systems, indices, data and authority files. And it is difficult to use these tools to compare across disciplines that have different research and publication practices. Furthermore, as scholarly communication continues to evolve, the limitations of existing metrics and tools are becoming increasingly evident.

There is no one number to perfectly or “correctly” represent the research impact of an individual or a group of researchers.

An author’s impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of times they have published and the number of times their academic publications are cited by other researchers. Although the simplest way to demonstrate your impact is to create a list of your publications and the number of times they have been cited, numerous algorithms based on publication data have also been created. Below are some of the more common metrics and tools you can use to measure research impact. Measures of research performance, impact, and engagement may be used when applying for grants or academic promotion.

Common Measures of Author Impact