There are many options for tracking and maintaining a record of your scholarship online. Management of your online scholarly presence is an important part of creating a record of continuous, engaged scholarship for rank, promotion, and tenure.
ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Think of it like a DOI for a researcher. This persistent identifier helps make sure that your work is always associated with you, not another person with the same name!
You can include your ORCID when submitting articles to journals and you can also link it across other scholarly profile systems.
Google Scholar allows you to make a profile and "claim" your scholarship. You can check who is citing your work, view your citations over time, and compute impact measures like your h-index. If your Google Scholar profile is set to public, it will appear in Scholar search results when users search for your name. You can add your ORCID to your Google Scholar profile for crosslinking.
ResearchGate goes beyond a scholarly profile. This site is designed to encourage networking among researchers as well as promote sharing publications.
Share wisely; check your rights before uploading!
Copyright, open access, and self-archiving policies vary by journal. Before uploading any copies of your work to ResearchGate or another site, use Open Policy Finder (formerly SHERPA/RoMEO) to check your specific legal rights. If your journal is not listed in Open Policy Finder, check the journal or publisher website or contact the journal directly.
Article-level metrics (ALMs) attempt to quantify the reach and impact of a single research publication. ALMs provide a snapshot of how an individual article is being discussed, shared, and used.
An author's impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of academic publications authored and the number of times these publications are cited by other researchers.
There is an increasing number of author level metrics to choose from, but publication count and h-index are two of the better-known metrics.
The number of academic publications published
Measures both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations). An h-index of 5 means that a researcher has five publications that have been cited at least five times.
H-index can be found on Google Scholar, or can be calculated manually. Note that h-indexes calculated on Google Scholar may different from manual calculations or h-indexes in other databases as the databases track different content.
To calculate an h-index manually, list your publications in descending order, based on the number of times they've been cited. Your h-index is the last number in the list where the number of citations is equally to or greater than the article's rank in the list.
Example:
| Article | Citations | h-index |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 47 | The first paper has been cited at least once, so the h-index is at least 1 |
| 2 | 32 | The second paper has been cited at least twice, so the h-index is at least 2 |
| 3 | 10 | The third paper has been cited at least three times, so the h-index is at least 3 |
| 4 | 6 | The fourth paper has been citated at least four times, so the h-index is at least 4 |
| 5 | 4 | The fifth paper has not been cited five or more times, so the h-index is below 5 |
| 6 | 4 | The sixth citation does not factor into calculating the h-index for this researcher |
| 7 | 1 | The seventh citation does not factor into calculating the h-index for this researcher |
In the above example, the researcher would have an h-index of 4.
Journal (or publisher) metrics are an attempt to measure and enumerate the prestige that publications carry. These metrics usually take into account the number of articles published per year and the number of citations to articles published in that journal.
Note that the value and impact of a journal do not necessarily mean that all articles published in the journal will be meaningful or impactful. Similarly, publication in a lower ranked journal does not mean that articles will have less impact.
The Adler University Library does not subscribe to Web of Science or Scopus. Researchers should check for journal metrics on the journal or publisher website for the journals they have published in.
