Researcher Identifiers and your Online Research Profile

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly important for researchers to maintain an online presence to their research.  As the research landscape

 expands, it becomes essential to differentiate yourself from fellow peers and to disambiguate yourself from other researchers with similar names or fields of study.

Two ways to do this are to:

1. Establish your researcher identifers to ensure that your research is associated with your name only (and not with other, similar sounding names); and
2. Establish an online profile of your research to allow for greater dissemination, which in turn can lead to greater impact and citation metrics.

An example of the problem the party infrastructure was attempting to solve is demonstrated by the following examples of public information about Tim Flannery:

Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof) (1956-)

He is also known as:

• Flannery, Tim
• Flannery, Timothy
• Flannery, Timothy F.
• Flannery, Timothy Fridjof

And he may also be known as:

• Flannery, T.
• Flannery, T.F.

He may have multiple author identifiers as a result of his publications:

• e.g. Scopus Id, Researcher Id, etc.

Researcher identifiers are important because they:

• Provide a persistent identifier

• Easily identify your work and increase your visibility

• Offer a tool to measure impact

• Resolve author misidentification and any changes in institutional affiliations

• Group name variants for which an author has published under

• Provide more accurate citation metrics, as all your publications are linked to your identifier without any 'ring-ins'

Researcher identifiers are like creating a DOI for a person.

Check out this example of linked identifiers (courtesy of ANDS):

The rise of academic social networking sites, such as ResearchGate and LinkedIn, has meant that researchers are increasingly being provided with avenues to disseminate their research outputs and to connect with other researchers in their field.  However, while it may be a good idea to promote your online presence, care should be taken as to which online site is used for what purpose, and to know the difference between what a social networking site is compared to the humble open access repository.