The visibility of your research is in your own hands. Increase your visibility in the scientific community with your profiles in databases, with researcher identifiers, or with profile services.
The visibility of your research is in your own hands. Increase your visibility in the scientific community with your profiles in databases, with researcher identifiers, or with profile services.
Affiliation policy
Your author profile plays a central role in your visibility. Here your university’s affiliation policy forms the basis and ensures that your name and organisational affiliation are correctly displayed. This is relevant because it ensures that your research work is correctly indexed in information systems and ultimately correctly attributed to your personal and organisational profile in databases. In this way, your achievements can be properly evaluated and clearly attributed to you.
Author profiles in databases
Your author profile in databases such as Web of Science or Scopus is one of the central aspects with which you can increase your visibility. It is important that your profile is unique. For example, if you have different spellings of your name, the database provider may automatically create multiple profiles for you. If this happens, important metrics, such as the number of citations, may be incorrect because they are split between two or more profiles. This can be detrimental in a tenure process, as relevant research may not be attributed to you. This error may also persist if you automatically import this data into your university's research information system (known as CRIS). You should therefore check regularly that all your publications listed in the database have been assigned to your profile. If several author profiles exist, some database providers offer the option of merging the profiles in a few clicks. If this option is not available, contact the database provider to have the profiles merged for you.
Google Scholar
A Google Scholar account is also a useful tool for disseminating your research. Many researchers do not (only) use databases, but also use Google to search for information. Unlike databases, which only index publications from selected journals, Google Scholar allows you to present all your publications. To do this, regularly update your publications in your profile. When researchers find your publications, the path to your other publications is not far from your profile. Google Scholar also allows people to follow you and receive notifications when a new publication is added to your profile.
Persistent Identifiers for Researchers
Incorrect attribution of your publications in databases can be avoided by using persistent identifiers for researchers. Examples of such IDs are ORCID, Scopus ID, Researcher ID (Web of Science) or ArXiv-iD. If you include the ID with your publication, the publication will automatically be correctly assigned to your profile because it matches the ID of your personal profile in the database. Even name similarity with other researchers or different name variants can be resolved in this way. The TU Graz library recommends ORCID for this purpose. You can read more about the advantages of this non-proprietary ID in our related blog post.
Networking through profile services
Another way to increase the visibility of your research is to use profile services such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Not only can you interact and network with other researchers, but you can also post your CV and research outputs. These profile services also offer the option of subscribing to individual researchers' publications, so that users receive updates as soon as new publications are uploaded by that person. This way, your publications automatically reach new readers when they subscribe to you. All you need is an account where you regularly enter your publications.
Using your university's CRIS
Depending on the functionality of your institution's research information system, you may have different options for increasing your visibility. Some CRIS allow you to enter all your achievements, IDs, profile services, links and social media accounts, and also automatically synchronise with other platforms such as Scopus or ORCID, making it a one-stop-shop. This increases your visibility and saves you work. An example of such a system is the PURE research information system.
The publications you enter into the system will also be publicly visible on the CRIS frontend, depending on the visibility settings you have chosen. In some CRIS, such as PURE, Google Scholar automatically indexes them once they are publicly visible. In addition, some CRIS allow you to create a public CV to provide other researchers with a comprehensive profile of your research output.
Open Access
If you have the opportunity to publish your research in gold open access journals, take advantage of it. As the article will then be freely accessible, this will increase the visibility of your research. When publishing in closed access journals, check the contract for open access options: Most commercial publishers allow the article to be self archived in a repository. This publishing option is called the green way to open access. Please note that commercial publishers may have different conditions for self archiving in a repository. Some publishers may impose embargo periods. This means that you are not allowed to upload the publication to a repository until a certain amount of time has passed since the first publication. This period is usually three, six or twelve months. Other publishers do not allow authors to publish the publisher's version of the publication in a repository. Depending on the contract, you may have to use the pre-print or post-print version of the article. You can find all the terms and conditions that apply to reprints in the publisher's contract that was sent to you. You can also check the embargo periods of individual publishers on the Sherpa Romeo website.
Support from your university's publication support service
Implementing the points above will take little effort if you make regular time commitments. If you encounter problems or are interested in more in-depth knowledge about research visibility, your university's publication support will be happy to help. Researchers at Graz University of Technology can contact them at service.bibliothek@tugraz.at.
Links
Checklist for Visibility – Making Research Performance Visible
The visibility of your research is in your own hands. Increase your visibility in the scientific community with your profiles in databases, with researcher identifiers, or with profile services.
