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Research Guides

Manage Your Research Identity and Track Your Impact

This guide describes how to build a researcher identity online through the use of unique IDs and social media profiles. It also describes online tools for tracking the impact of your research.

Author ID Services

Below are some web services where you can create a unique author profile or ID number. This identifies you as a unique author, and  helps distinguish you from others with the same last name and initials. You'd be suprised how many people working in similar disciplines may share your surname and initials - it can be surprisingly hard in a large discipline to distinguish one JM Smith from another!

Author identifier tools

The Open Researcher Community ID (ORCID) is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other and supports you in your manuscript and grant submission activities.

Benefits of the ORCID include:

  • allows you to gather all of your academic outputs in one place
  • distinguishes you from other authors with the same name
  • an open, nonprofit platform not tied to a specific database or publishing company
  • integration with other researcher ID services you may already use, such as Researcher ID and Scopus Author Identifier

ORCID is required by an increasing number of funding agencies and publishers.

How to use ORCID:

  1. Claim your ORCID ID
  2. Add works to your ORCID record.  There are three ways to do this:
  3. Add your grants - either use the UberWizard tool or add manually.
  4. Activate the CrossRef Autoupdate feature
  5. Connect your existing profiles to your ORCID.
  6. Connect your ORCID with your UCalgary sign in credentials.  To decrease the possibility of forgetting your password, you can connect your UCalgary Central Authentication Service (CAS) username and password to your ORCID.  ORCID still requires a unique username and password, so that if you ever lose access to your institutional credentials (e.g. leave the institution) you will still be able to access your ORCID.
  7. You can also authorize a trusted individual to help maintain your ORCID. The trusted individual must also claim their own ORCID as a prerequisite. Instructions for authorizing a trusted individual.

Article groups in Web of Science are likely authored by the same person. But Web of Science doesn’t always get it right. Claim your Web of Science publications by creating a ResearcherID and a Publons account.

Benefits of a Researcher ID:

  • Ensure publications included in Web of Knowledge are attributed correctly
  • Track or share your citation metrics (citations, H-index).
  • ResearcherID can also hold records from other sources. However, only records from the Web of Science Core Collection include metrics and are included in citation metrics calculations.
  • It's ORCID compliant so you can sync data to your ORCID account. 

How to:

  • Register for or log in to your Web of Science profile and follow the instructions to verify your author record. You can claim articles that are yours, unclaim articles that have been incorrectly attributed to you, and request to merge profiles if Web of Science has created multiple profiles for you.

Publications indexed in Scopus are assigned an Author Identifier (new or existing). But Scopus doesn’t always get it right. Manage your profile using the Scopus Author Feedback Wizard.

Benefits of a Scopus Author Identifier:

  • Ensure publications included in Scopus are attributed correctly.
  • Track or share your citation metrics (citations, H-index, article level altmetrics).
  • It's ORCID compliant so you can sync data to your ORCID account. 

Learn how to find your Scopus Author Identifier, and correct your author details if publications are misattributed.

 

 

Create an author profile and Google will identify publications indexed in Google Scholar that are likely by you.

Benefits of Google Scholar Profile:

  • Ensure your publications are attributed correctly
  • Track or share your citation metrics (citations, H-index, and i10-index)

Note: Google's citation metrics are generally considered less reliable than Scopus and Web of Science in that it’s not clear what is included/excluded in indexing. However, for some disciplines Google Scholar Citations may better represent your body of work. 

Learn how to create a Google author profile.

Harzing's Publish or Perish is a software program that helps researchers clean up and present their Google Scholar profiles.

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