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Creating & Managing an Academic Profile

This guide focuses on skills and tools for discussing, interacting, presenting, writing, commenting, and finally publishing your research in the social networks used by academics.

Building your academic profile online can help demonstrate your authority, expertise and research interests. The internet has become the starting point for all searches, so you want to make sure that people are finding authorized biographical and contact information about you. 

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., richard feynman. (Google Scholar Profile, 2021)

  • Collate your publications and openly accessible copies in one spot
  • Automate your publication lists
  • Prioritize your profile in page rankings when people search for your work
  • Automatically gather bibliometrics metrics from Google Scholar into your profile 
  • Use Google Scholar profile data and Publish or Perish software to analyze your research impact

How to Register

1. Go to scholar.google.com and click “Sign in” in the upper right corner then click on “My Profile” to get started.

2. Fill out your name, affiliation, and email address. Use your UBC email address and check your email to complete the verification process. This will authorize Google Scholar to display your affiliation with UBC.

3. Select "Next."

  • If there are publications that don’t belong to you, click the check box beside each and then click “Delete.” 
  • Select checkboxes next to all records that refer to the same work and click “Merge.”
  • If you do not have any publications, Google Scholar will present you with some options for publications that it thinks could belong to you. To move forward with the process, you will have to accept one of these and then later remove it from your profile.
  • When you're done, click "Next." 

4. Now you'll be given two decisions to make:

  • Do you want Google Scholar to automatically add your publications to your profile as it finds them or do you want it to send you an email with publications to review before they appear on your profile? This can be changed later.
  • Do you want your profile to be public? If you check the box to make it public your profile will be found through searches.
  •  Click “Follow” in the upper right-hand corner of your profile page to receive email alerts for any new publications associated with you, as well as new citations of your work
Additional Resources
UBC Examples

Humanities Commons is a nonprofit network that enables humanities scholars and practitioners to create a professional profile, discuss common interests, develop new publications, and share their work. The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone, regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. Full-featured accounts are and will remain free for individual users; the network is sustained by the financial contributions of participating organizations.

How to Register
  1. Click the Register button at the top right-hand corner of the screen
  2. Click Let’s Get Started at the bottom of the screen to proceed
  3. Fill in the registration form
  4. Review and agree to our terms and conditions. Click on the blue Review Terms and Conditions button to open up the terms and check off the I Agree box at the bottom of the screen.
  5. Select the Submit button below the form.
  6. You’ll receive a confirmation message to the e-mail address you provided in the form, which verifies that you are indeed the owner of the e-mail account.
How to Use Humanities Commons

UBC Examples

Academia.edu is a Facebook-like social networking platform for more than 40 million scholars. It allows people to search by name, research interests and universities. The site is highly visited and prominent in Google searches. Academia.edu allows you to update your status, upload your academic papers (including unpublished drafts), list your research interests and follow other scholars with similar areas of research. This site also provides great assessment tools that allow you to be notified when someone views your profile or papers.

How to Register
  1. Go to the Academia.edu main page. 
  2. Select a sign-up option: Facebook, Google or email
  3. An email will be sent to you to confirm your account.
  4. You will then receive a welcome email from the site with a link to  Edit Your Profile to get started
Additional Resources
UBC Examples

With more than 9 million researchers, ResearchGate is a leading social networking site for scientists and an increasing number of scholars in humanities and social sciences. It offers the same functionality as Academia.edu: share publications, get statistics about views and downloads of your research; collaborate with peers, etc.

How to Register
  1. Go to www.researchgate.net
  2. Click Join for free or connect with Facebook or LinkedIn
  3. Select which type of researcher you are
  4. Enter your name, institutional email address, and choose a password
  5. To finish creating your account, you will need to click the link in the activation email you receive
How to Use ResearchGate
UBC Examples

Loop 

Loop, a profile tool from Frontier, is a  cross-platform integration that makes researcher profiles and research discoverable across the boundaries of publishers and organizations. If you have a Loop profile, it will be discoverable via your articles in the original journals in which they were published. Examples of online author profiles can be seen on the following Nature and Frontiers articles.

How to Use Loop
Examples

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a website devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. SSRN is viewed as particularly strong in the fields of economics, finance, accounting, management, and law. Academic papers can be uploaded directly to the site by authors as PDF documents. All author-uploaded papers are available for worldwide free downloading. Users can also subscribe to abstracting e-mail journals covering a broad range of subject matters.

How to Use SSRN
UBC Examples