Having an author profile online can help to distinguish your research from others and showcase your scholarly contributions to the academic community. This is one of the first steps to increasing your research visibility. When other academics try to search for your name on the web or on other online systems, they would be able to see a list of your publications and the impact of your work. Taking the few minutes to create, maintain and update your profiles will also benefit grant funding agencies and other possible collaborators who wish to work with you.
Here are some of the more commonly used author profiles and platforms. You can read more about them through the tabs below.
NUS research staff will also need to maintain and update your NUS Elements profile. To learn more about NUS Elements and how you can add publications to your profile, do refer to our NUS Elements resource guide.
ORCID iD is the acronym for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. This open source, not-for-profit community-driven initiative helps all who participate in scholarly research and innovation to be uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations across their career.
ORCID provides a standard unique author identifier that:
More importantly, having an ORCID iD allows you to connect to other systems like Scopus Author Profiles or Web of Science's ResearcherID. For NUS researchers, having an ORCID iD also allows you to link that to your NUS Elements Profile.
To learn more about ORCID iD, visit the ORCID website.
Here are some FAQs and resources that may be relevant to you if you have trouble configuring your ORCID iD:
Google Scholar tracks and provides basic citation metrics for a variety of scholarly materials such as books, book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings and even dissertations that are available on the web. Through Google Scholar, you will be able to sign up for a Google Scholar Profile that will collate information about your scholarly materials indexed in Google Scholar. This will also provide you with citation metrics such as your Google Scholar h-index or citation counts. In addition, a public Google Scholar Profile allows other researchers across the world to easily find your work, increasing your research visibility and potentially open up new avenues of academic collaboration.
Here are the instructions to create your own Google Scholar profile:
1. Go to https://scholar.google.com/ and click on My Profile at the top left corner of the window. Alternatively, you could also click on Sign in at the top right of the page. You would need to log in to your Google account to create your Google Scholar Profile.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
2. You will then be prompted to fill up some basic information about yourself, such as your name, affiliation, work email, research areas and personal websites. These information will become available on your Google Scholar Profile
3. Next, you will be prompted to search for articles that you have written to add them to your profile.
- You can try searching for your publishing name variant in the search bar to identify publications that are already indexed.
- You can also choose to either search via individual articles or via article groups by selecting and toggling the options above the search bar.
- Select the relevant articles that you have wrote by clicking on the checkboxes. When articles are selected, the article count on the top right of the page will increase. Once you are done, click on the blue arrow button to move to the next step.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
4. You will need to then complete two more additional steps before the setup is complete. You can prompt Google to notify you when new articles are available for manual review or to allow Google to automatically update your profile for you. If you have a very common name, we suggest that you disable the automatic update and instead request Google to notify you to manually review correct or incorrect additions that appear.
5. You can also toggle to make your profile public or private - a public profile is recommended so other researchers can find you.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
6. After the initial setup, you can also add other articles if there are missing publications not picked up from the initial search. use the + icon to search by specific article title or manually providing the article metadata yourself.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
7. There are also options for you to merge, delete and export records on your profile. For example, if there is a publication that has multiple records indexed by Google Scholar (due to metadata discrepancies), you can merge the records together for your Google Scholar profile.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
8. Your newly created profile will now show your list of publications and your total citations and h-index on the graph on the right.
"Screenshot" from Google Scholar by Google
Scopus automatically creates Scopus author profiles for authors who have publications that are indexed in their database. Their algorithm automatically matches an indexed publication to a profile based on the author's name, affiliation and subject areas. As such, it is important to ensure that your Scopus author profile is correct and accurate so that other researchers can search for your profiles and publications on Scopus. In addition, this will ensure that your metrics such as number of publications, total citation counts or h-index are accurate in Scopus.
Click here to learn more about the Scopus Author Identifier.
Go to Scopus and search for any author by last name, first name or affiliation under Author Search.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
At the search results page, click on the profile that belongs to you.
You will be able to see your list of publications, citation counts and basic metrics. Your Scopus author profile ID can be found just under the profile name. You can also click on 'Connect to ORCID' to link your Scopus author ID to your ORCID iD (learn more about this here). To find out more about your metrics click on 'citation overview'.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
When searching for your name on Scopus, it may be possible that you will retrieve multiple profiles that belong to you. This may be due to discrepancies due to different name variants or affiliation names. In this case, you can select your relevant profiles and click on 'Request to Merge Authors' to make changes to your profile. You will need an Elsevier account to complete this entire process.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
You will be able to make changes to your preferred names, affiliations, documents and profiles here in the Author Feedback Wizard.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
In particular, you can click on 'Documents' to expand the list of publications. You may review and remove any documents that do not belong to this merge by clicking on 'X Remove from merge'
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
If you have other documents that are missing, scroll down to the bottom of this Documents section and click on 'Search for missing documents on Scopus'.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
When you have reviewed your changes, click on 'Review change(s)' and then 'Submit Changes'. Scopus will perform their own internal checks after you have submitted your request and inform you of the outcome of the process after 2 to 4 weeks.
“Screenshot” from Scopus by Elsevier
In the event that you would like to make changes to a singular Scopus profile, you can also click on the 'Edit profile' icon to suggest changes to the profile using the same Scopus Author Feedback Wizard
Web of Science also automatically creates a ResesarcherID that compiles the researchers' publications to avoid author misidentification on Web of Science. It also provides metrics such as number of citing articles, h-index and citation counts. To 'claim' and make edits to your ResearcherID and profile on Web of Science, you will need to have a Web of Science account.
Previously, a Publons account was required. In 2022, Publons has joined Web of Science. To learn more about their new researcher profile platform, refer to their Clarivate libguide.
The steps below will cover how you can identify your ResearcherID and how you can claim it.
Go to Web of Science and search for any author by Last Name and First Name under Researcher Search
“Screenshot” from Web of Science by Clarivate
Depending on your search, you may retrieve multiple author records. Select the relevant author record by looking at the affiliations, list of recent publications and top journals.
“Screenshot” from Web of Science by Clarivate
At the profile page, you will be able to 'claim your record', 'verify your record', or 'submit a correction'. You will be prompted to signup for a Web of Science Account, and the instructions thereafter will explain what needs to be done. For more information, you may also refer to https://webofscience.help.clarivate.com/en-us/Content/wos-researcher-profile.html.
“Screenshot” from Web of Science by Clarivate
Once your records have been claimed to your Web of Science account - you'll be able to edit your researcher profile in your account settings once you log in to your account on Web of Science.