Demonstrate Your Impact: Manage Your Identity

Managing your researcher identity can enhance your metrics to be more reliable and consistent. There are several ways you can work to manage your research identity including:

• publishing consistently with the same name and initials;
• monitoring and managing your profiles in services such as Google Scholar; and
• registering for and using author identifier an profile tools such as an ORCID, or SciENcv.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Chris Hartman

Researcher profiles can be a great tools to use to maximize impact of your work and connect with researchers globally. However, there are important considerations when using proprietary tools such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate:

• carefully read user licenses to see who owns what you upload to sites;
• know your rights to your work; and
• be careful of marketization of your works.

You might also consider how many profiles you'd like to manage. Having multiple profiles over different platforms that you must manage separately can be time consuming. Consider managing one or two that are most useful, and those that link to others for consistency.

The University Library recommends ORCID iDs and records for our faculty and graduate students. 

Why ORCID? 

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit, internationally used persistent identifier that supports research integrity and disambiguation of scholars. ORCID iDs, and their associated profiles: 

• establish a long term, trustworthy scholarly record and make research outputs more visible and accessible to the wider scholarly community and the public;
• integrate with numerous systems used by publishers, funders, institutions, and other research services, allowing researchers to populate forms, biosketches, and reports with data from their ORCID record, eliminating repetitive data entry; and 
• have expanded work types inclusive of those in the humanities and fine arts, making it a beneficial platform across disciplines. 

Locally, ORCID adoption at Portland State is a priority for RGS in the Roadmap to 2030, and is promoted by the University Library as a low-cost replacement for the previous faculty profile platform, SelectedWorks.