Options for online profiles

Rebecca Bryant, PhDVisiting Project Manager, Research Information

ServicesUniversity Library

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881

Types of profile services

Commercial services

Research Information Management Systems (RIMS)

Unique identifier registry (ORCID)

Commercial Services

• Proprietary• Free to researchers• Facilitate comprehensive profiles• Data includes:

• Publications/outputs • Affiliations• Keywords• Photo• Full text document upload available• Usually support social networking

• Data is web scraped and populated by the profile holder.

• These products have a social networking component (“Facebook for scientists”)

• User cedes control of data• Users can upload full text articles• Reusability: low

• Difficult or impossible to extract information from these services

• May offer some bibliometrics• Each are a little different and may have

strengths for different parts of the academic audience (science, humanities, Europe, etc.)

• Hybrid commercial profile & citation index (like WOS or Scopus)

• Includes citations for any publication it can scrape from a public source like RIMS, institutional repositories, PubMed, WorldCat, and more.

• Data is web scraped and also populated by the profile holder; no document deposit

• Provides citation counts for each document

• Users can establish a profile, but identifying information is minimal

• Limited social networking functionality

• Easy for users to extract their citations from GS in order to reuse elsewhere, such as in RIMS or ORCID.

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Research Information Management Systems (RIMS)

• Widely used in Europe and increasingly in the United States

• Helps to aggregate research information and outputs across a campus

• Vendors are both commercial & open:• Elsevier, Symplectic, Thomson Reuters, VIVO,

Digital Measures, Harvard Profiles

• https://experts.illinois.edu

• Specific to an institution or a college• Most of our peers now have implemented

RIMS

• Goals– Facilitate better discoverability of experts,

locally and globally– Reputation management– Facilitate local data re-use

• Free to researchers• Reusability: high

• Easy for profile holders and institutions to extract and reuse information

• Data• Publications, usually from an authoritative

source• Local affiliations, populated form authoritative

campus source• Grants & patents, from authoritative campus

sources• Keywords, both from data mining & user added• Other profile info like a photo or research

statement

• Users can often link to full text of articles (and will grow over time)

Researcher identifiers (ORCID)

Goals• To disambiguate author/researcher names• Use unique iD number to identify authors,

not their non-unique names– http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881

• Ensure each research receives credit for each work they produce, without confusion with others

• Create a hub of metadata for open sharing between systems

• Save time for researchers and institutions• Improve data quality

• Not-for-profit• Community-driven

• Funding agencies• Universities/libraries• Publishers• Professional societies

• Free to researchers • Data:

• Publications, patents, data, other works• Grants• Affiliations• Name variants• Keywords

• Data can be both hand-entered and linked from other sources

• Reusability: high• But still difficult for individuals to extract their

own profile info

• Citation information only. No full-text deposits

• http://orcid.org

The problem: How can we tell one researcher from

another?

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/101738/CIDays13_ORCIDFi

nal.pdf?sequence=11

What ORCID does that no other “profile” does

• Reliably connect a researcher with their publication/output from the point of manuscript submission– Publishers beginning to require

ORCID iD during MSS submission, starting with scientific publishers like IEEE, PLOS, AGU, and Science.

• Enables linkages between multiple systems globally, to facilitate open data exchange

• Minimizes the negative impact of name changes or common names

• Link to other author identifiers, such as Scopus ID or ResearcherID

• Disambiguate existing publications in existing citation indexes, including:– Web of Science– Scopus– MLA International Bibliography

Funding Agencies

Other Research Identifiers

Research &

Scholarly Societies

Publishers /

Manuscript Submission Systems

Repositories & More

Universities &

Research institutions

ORCID is a hub connecting the research landscape

Profile fatigue

• Proliferation of “profiles”

• Researcher confusion

• How do you best maintain your scholarly identity?

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Works cited

Allen, Elizabeth (2015). “Researcher #profilefatigue –what it is and why it’s so exhausting.” ScienceOpen blog. Retrieved from http://blog.scienceopen.com/2014/09/researcher-profilefatigue-what-it-is-and-why-its-exhausting/

Bryant, R. (2013). I registered for my ORCID iD. . . now what? ORCID Blog. Retrieved from https://orcid.org/blog/2013/12/05/i-claimed-my-orcid-id-now-what

Fortney, K., & Gonder, J. (2015). A social networking site is not an open access repository. Retrieved December 3, 2015, from http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/

Heller, L. (2015). What will the scholarly profile page of the future look like? The Impact Blog. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/16/scholarly-profile-of-the-future/

Ward, J., Bejarano, W., & Dudás, A. (2015). Scholarly social media profiles and libraries: A review. LIBER Quarterly, 24(4), 174–204.

Options for online profiles

Rebecca Bryant, PhDVisiting Project Manager, Research Information

ServicesUniversity Library

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881