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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.

Researcher identification schemes (or author IDs) provide a unique identifier for each researcher. Having a distinctive author name is essential for academics’ work to be found among a global network of researchers. 

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a free nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output (and other user-supplied pieces of information). (Wikipedia, 2021)

ORCID offers:

  • Clean, easy-to-use interface that connects researchers with their published work, publishers, and funders.
  •  Assists in distinguishing between researchers with the same names.
  • Connects with other platforms (e.g. ResearcherID, ScopusID) to import information about publications and other works into your ORCID.
  • Raises researchers’ profiles.
How to Register 
  1. Go to https://orcid.org. Under the For Researchers tab, click Register for an ORCID iD.
  2. Enter your name, e-mail address, and a password of your choice in the appropriate fields, and determine, in general, who you think should see your ORCID record. (You can always change this general setting or define more specific settings after you create the account.)
  3. Next, determine how frequently you want e-mail from ORCID, affirm you are not a robot by completing the CAPTCHA, and agree to the ORCID terms of service. Click Register.
  4. You will receive a verification e-mail, sent to whichever address you put in the field when you registered. Click the link ORCID supplies in the e-mail to verify your account.
Additional Resources
UBC Examples

Web of Science Research Profile is an integrated space to manage researcher profiles, author identifiers, and peer review. The tool offers:

  • The creation and integration of persistent identifiers for authors ensuring correct author attribution and disambiguation
  • The development of a profile space to add publications, track citations, and ensure their publication records are correctly attributed across Web of Science platforms
  • The ability to build a more complete profile of a researchers impact by automatically tracking their peer review and editorial history alongside their publications
How to Register 

Via Web of Science:

  1. Go to Web of Science
  2. Select "Create and Manage a Profile".
  3. Register for a free Web of Science account.
  4. On the left side menu, select "Profile" and begin to add content from the drop list. 
Additional Resources

UBC Examples

Scopus

Scopus automatically generates an author identifier for authors in the Scopus database and attempts to disambiguate authors and build an author profile. Citation metrics are included with each author profile. You cannot edit your author profile yourself, but you can request corrections if publications are incorrectly assigned (or missing from) your profile or you find other errors. 

International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI)

ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number (ISO 27729) for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and is used to disambiguate contributor names to improve search and discovery.  It is most commonly used in commercial publishing.

Examples