Your online scholarly identity...why is it important?

There are so many tools out there now to help researchers build their online identity – ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the list goes on. But what do we mean by ‘online identity’ and why is it so important to researchers? (A side question could also be why we, as librarians, care about this when obviously, many researchers don’t? But that is another story altogether).

So, what do we mean by online identity. Everyone has an online identity if you have had anything to do with the internet. Type your name into Google and most people will get at least one hit on their name with some people getting many hits. But why is this important? Your online identity is what people who don’t know you (but know about you) search for – prospective employers, colleagues, rivals, people you have just met at a conference. From a professional viewpoint, it is important that these people find your information, and most importantly, find accurate information easily.

Maintaining and curating your professional identity is the key to achieving this. But in a minefield of options which ones do you choose?

You have probably been using products that you have either been using in a previous life, or that your colleagues are already using. However, no matter which product (or products) you use, it is critical that these be kept up to date. There is nothing worse that searching and finding someone’s profile only to find that the most recent publication listed is from four years ago, or where they say they work is clearly not the case.

Where I work, we have three that we recommend that researchers keep up to date – ORCID, Google Scholar profile and of course, the institutional repository.

[Note: for the purpose of this I am discounting social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – all of which are important in disseminating information about yourself and your works.]

ORCID has quickly risen to be a universal identifier for scholarly outputs, and, why wouldn’t it? It is free to use, independent, and has a fantastic developing team behind it. Being a truly independent identifier also means that it easily integrates with external systems (unless you work where I do, where nothing really seems to integrate with anything else – but that is a whole other issue). With ORCID you can upload your outputs, or connect to another data source (such as Scopus or Research Data Australia) and any of your works listed in these data sources will be imported into your profile. You can add grant information, education and work details, as well as provide links to other online profiles that you maintain. By sharing your ORCID iD URL with colleagues you can provide a quick, one-stop-shop to all professional information about yourself.

The second online profile we recommend curating is a Google Scholar My Citations Profile. Google Scholar is big….not as big as Google, but in academic circles it is still pretty awesome. Having a Google Scholar profile set up is one key way for other people to find your research. Of course, it relies on your publications being indexed and available in Google, although there is the option of manually adding selected metadata about those that aren’t in Google. A word of warning – it is very easy to accidently add publications that aren’t yours to your profile, or for someone else to add your publications to their profile. Careful checking and periodic searches of your works may be advisable.

Which brings us to the old favourite, the institutional repository. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay and likely tied into your institutions reporting requirements. So, love it or hate it, you may be required to use it. I love our institutional repository, even the funny quirks that make it frustrating to work with, but it serves a purpose and a function in our academic community. And it is easy for our researchers. All they need to do is send in the metadata of their recent publications and the Research Collections team does the rest! It is a way for researchers to archive their outputs, preserve them, make them open access, and provides a nice link that they can send out to colleagues. It is also indexed by Google, so readily discoverable for anyone searching for your publications. I can’t speak highly enough for institutional repositories around the world – they are by far the best way to promote your research.

This then leaves us with the ‘badies’ of the online scholarly identity world – ResearchGate and Adademia.edu. I must admit that each of these have their place in the scholarly identity world, and all three of them are wildly popular in various disciplines. My reasons for disliking them are purely selfish – they are a rival to our institutional repository. And in this day and age where everyone is time poor, why invest your energies in keeping these up to date as well as the other critical profiles. ResearchGate and Academica.edu are both proprietary products that could turn off at any time. They have no preservation strategy and no commitment to keeping your work safe. If you wish to use them to disseminate your works, then please, please, please do so as an additional method to those listed above.



So now that you have all methods for people to find information about you and your works, what do you do? The key is to spend some time each week, month, couple of months (depending on your frequency of publication) updating them. As stated above, there is nothing worse than colleagues or other interested people finding an out of date profile. By keeping these updated, you are presenting your best self to those that want to find you.