Library Guides: Researcher Profiles: Researcher Profiles

Researcher Visibility: Why is it important?

For researchers, heightened visibility can lead to positive gains, including opportunities to form important new networks; personal reputation-building; new opportunities for sharing research results; and invitations to participate in academic events.

Introducing Researcher Profiles

Researcher profiles are employed by researchers to make themselves, and their research, more widely known to others. They are regarded as an effective tool for enhancing researcher visibility.

Typically, researcher profiles are online-accessible documents providing information about the researcher, including any combination of biographical details, publications lists, notable achievements, collaborators' names, institutional and professional society memberships, research and readership metrics, and so on.

This section will introduce two well-known online tools for constructing Researcher Profiles:

ORCID
Google Scholar

Why Are Researcher Profiles Important?

An authentic and thoughtfully constructed researcher profile has benefits:

Consolidating all your research outputs into a singular Researcher Profile record
Promoting your research output and activities: publications, presentations, collaborations
Helping you to meet publisher's expectations, and comply with instructions from research funding bodies
Generating and promulgating research metrics for you
Enabling your research to become highly discoverable

Source: https://griffith.edu.au/library/research-publishing/researcher-profiles

Image sources used in the "Researcher Visibility" Section (at the top of this column)

Laptop photo
Pixabay licence: Free for commercial use – No attribution required
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Concept Man photo
Pixabay licence: Free for commercial use - No attribution required
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Plant seedling researcher hands
Pixabay licence: Free for commercial use - No attribution required
Image by supratimdas054 from Pixabay

Laboratory photo
Pixabay licence: Free for commercial use – No attribution required
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

Researcher Profiles by ORCID

A Researcher Profile Tool https://orcid.org/

About ORCID
ORCID is a freely available, highly regarded tool for constructing researcher profiles.  ORCID is an acronym for Open Researcher and Contributor ID.
About the organisation
ORCID is a global, non-profit, community-built organisation
ORCID researcher profiling
ORCID's notable feature is that it assigns researchers with a unique, permanent ORCID identifier, through which their research activities/outputs are able to be linked
Scope
Cross-disciplinary, cross-sector, and multi-national in scope
Works with other identifier systems
How ORCID works
No matter how many researchers carry the same name, the unique ORCID ensures that the work is correctly attributed to its originator.
It is an enduring identifier – ORCID remains the same through researcher name changes, spelling variations, abbreviations, etc
It enables the total of a researcher’s output to be accessible from a singular location
Structure of an ORCID
Contains 16 digits – randomly generated
All ORCIDs begin with https://orcid.org/ followed by four blocks of four digits, separated by hyphens

Note: Some funding bodies require an ORCID ID as a prerequisite to obtaining funds

For additional information on ORCID, refer to the ORCID Profiles Tab of this Guide

Source: This information has been derived and adapted from https://info.orcid.org
ORCID Icon source: Wikimedia Commons
Licence:

Recommendation: ORCID profiles

Recommended
Griffith University's ORCID web pages
for ultra-clear instructions on setting up
and using ORCID

Researcher Profiles by Google Scholar

Google Scholar

A Researcher Profile Tool scholar.google.com

About Google Scholar Profiles
Google Scholar Profiles is a resource linked to the Google Scholar database. It enables authors to exhibit and share their scholarly work, and provides useful tools for quantifying and visualising researcher impact.
About the organisation
Google - the parent company of Google Scholar - is a global leader in the development of internet-related services
GS researcher profiling
Using Google Scholar, researchers are able to set up public profiles, and compute various types of publicly accessible citation metrics derived from their research activities.
Scope
Inclusions: Scholarly articles, including journal articles, technical reports, dissertations, pre- and post-prints, abstracts, conference papers.
Exclusions: anything above 5MB, book reviews, editorials, news and magazine articles
How Google Scholar Profiles work
Each profiled researcher's page contains a list of publications, linked back to Google Scholar (full-text)
The statistics on the profile (h-index etc) are derived from the publication metrics of the items on the researcher's profile page
Structure of a GS researcher profile
Information about the researcher
Publications list, with cited-by counts
Follow button
Links to co-authors’ GS profiles
Metrics: citation counts by year; h-index, i10-index etc

For additional information on Google Scholar, refer to the Google Scholar Profiles Tab of this Guide

Google Scholar logo source:
Wikimedia Commons Licence: CC0

Recommendation: Google Scholar, the ultimate guide

Recommended

Google Scholar: the ultimate guide
Instruction pages from Google Scholar