13 October 2014

Managing your academic identity.

A friend from Facebook posted today that she stumbled across another academic with her same first and last name, working on similar research topics, and remarked that mistaken identities were bound to happen.

There are few other Hertwecks out there, but I still do what I can to manage and maintain my academic identity, so that other folks can find this blog, the papers I write, my research website, etc. There are social media style sites for maintaining your research products (Academia.edu, ResearchGate), but here are my favorite alternatives:

  1. Get an account on ORCID. It's free, and you'll get a unique identifier to include when you submit grants, manuscripts, etc. This is also a nice segue into checking out your Scopus author identifier (if your organization has access).  
  2. Curate your Google Scholar profile. This is another free tool, and there's nice documentation and explanations if you click through the link. Citation tracking tools and the ability to manually adjust which articles show up in your profile makes this a quick go-to for academics, plus there are other functionalities built in (i.e., citation alerts for topics which might interest you).
  3. Sign up for Impactstory. This is a great option if you have an active presence in social media or invest energy in other types of non-traditional academic deliverables. Although they recently transitioned to a paid subscription service, they are a non-profit and your money goes towards keeping the data and software open-source.
These were the first options that came to mind, although there are others which might be of interest. What am I missing? Who's got a better resource for maintaining your academic identity online?

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