Research Support: Profiles & Promoting Research

Ensuring your research is easily identifiable is very important and can be achieved by:

• Always using the same version of your name consistently throughout your career e.g. always use either the English or Irish version of your name but not both, never shorten your name, and always either include or exclude your middle initial(s)
• When publishing always use the same institutional name variant
• Creating online researcher profile(s).

There are a number of researcher profiles that you can create including ORCID and Google Scholar Researcher Profiles.

ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) is a registry of unique identifiers for researchers and scholars that is open, non-profit, transparent, mobile and community-based. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other contributor and supports automated linkages among all your professional activities. To register for an ORCID and find out more information go to https://orcid.org/.

In the 'My profile' service of Google Scholar, you can create a profile and track the citations to your publications. The researcher profile also computes citation metrics including the h-index. New items will automatically be added to your profile as Google Scholar finds them. If you make your researcher profile public it will appear in Google Scholar search results and increase the visibility of all your research outputs.

As the volume of publications continues to increase rapidly throughout the world, it is becoming more important to promote your research outputs to ensure that they don’t go unnoticed.

One method of promoting your research is to create a profile on an academic social networking site and add the details of your publications. There are several different sites including Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and the Social Science Research Network. Check out the current users of the different sites and speak to colleagues before deciding which academic social networking site you will create your profile in, or you may consider giving yourself a digital identity health check.

Social media can be useful means for publicising your research and also engaging with your audience.

• Blogs – write about your research and other developments in your field (www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com)
• Twitter – promote your research and receive feedback on your publications
• YouTube – recordings of presentations or other videos to showcase your research
• Slideshare – put up slides from conferences you presented to further promote your research activities

Over 10,000 scholarly links are shared on Twitter every day. It is a very useful method of promoting your research to fellow academics and also engaging with industry, funders and the wider public. Twitter can also be used to keep up-to-date with emerging research, researchers and trends. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has produced a guide to using Twitter for academics (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/).

Publons allows researchers to share and discuss peer review of academic publications.

• Publons allows you to get credit for the peer reviews you write (without breaking reviewer anonymity)
• You control how each review is displayed on your profile (blind, open, or published)
• You can add both pre-publication reviews for journals & post-publication reviews of any article

See this article in Nature for more information on Publons: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.16102