Panelist with Michael Twidale and Lisa Hinchliffe in a workshop event called "Managing Your Digital Footprint as a Scholar." I spoke about the landscape of online profiles available to scholars, particularly emphasizing the ORCID identifier.

1. Options for online profiles
Rebecca Bryant, PhD
Visiting Project Manager, Research Information
Services
University Library
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881

3. Types of profile services
Commercial services
Research Information
Management Systems (RIMS)
Unique identifier registry
(ORCID)

4. Commercial Services
• Proprietary
• Free to researchers
• Facilitate comprehensive profiles
• Data includes:
• Publications/outputs
• Affiliations
• Keywords
• Photo
• Full text document upload available
• Usually support social networking
• Data is web scraped and populated by the
profile holder.
• These products have a social networking
component (“Facebook for scientists”)
• User cedes control of data
• Users can upload full text articles
• Reusability: low
• Difficult or impossible to extract information
from these services
• May offer some bibliometrics
• Each are a little different and may have
strengths for different parts of the academic
audience (science, humanities, Europe, etc.)

7. • Hybrid commercial profile & citation index (like WOS or Scopus)
• Includes citations for any publication it can scrape from a public
source like RIMS, institutional repositories, PubMed, WorldCat,
and more.
• Data is web scraped and also populated by the profile holder; no
document deposit
• Provides citation counts for each document
• Users can establish a profile, but identifying information is
minimal
• Limited social networking functionality
• Easy for users to extract their citations from GS in order to reuse
elsewhere, such as in RIMS or ORCID.
7

8. 8

9. Research Information Management
Systems (RIMS)
• Widely used in Europe and increasingly in
the United States
• Helps to aggregate research information and
outputs across a campus
• Vendors are both commercial & open:
• Elsevier, Symplectic, Thomson Reuters, VIVO,
Digital Measures, Harvard Profiles
• https://experts.illinois.edu
• Specific to an institution or a college
• Most of our peers now have implemented
RIMS
• Goals
– Facilitate better discoverability of experts,
locally and globally
– Reputation management
– Facilitate local data re-use
• Free to researchers
• Reusability: high
• Easy for profile holders and institutions to
extract and reuse information
• Data
• Publications, usually from an authoritative
source
• Local affiliations, populated form authoritative
campus source
• Grants & patents, from authoritative campus
sources
• Keywords, both from data mining & user added
• Other profile info like a photo or research
statement
• Users can often link to full text of articles
(and will grow over time)

12. Researcher identifiers (ORCID)
Goals
• To disambiguate author/researcher names
• Use unique iD number to identify authors,
not their non-unique names
– http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881
• Ensure each research receives credit for
each work they produce, without
confusion with others
• Create a hub of metadata for open sharing
between systems
• Save time for researchers and institutions
• Improve data quality
• Not-for-profit
• Community-driven
• Funding agencies
• Universities/libraries
• Publishers
• Professional societies
• Free to researchers
• Data:
• Publications, patents, data, other works
• Grants
• Affiliations
• Name variants
• Keywords
• Data can be both hand-entered and linked
from other sources
• Reusability: high
• But still difficult for individuals to extract their
own profile info
• Citation information only. No full-text
deposits
• http://orcid.org

13. The problem: How can we tell one researcher from
another?
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/101738/CIDays13_ORCIDFi
nal.pdf?sequence=11

14. What ORCID does that no other
“profile” does
• Reliably connect a researcher
with their publication/output
from the point of manuscript
submission
– Publishers beginning to require
ORCID iD during MSS
submission, starting with
scientific publishers like IEEE,
PLOS, AGU, and Science.
• Enables linkages between
multiple systems globally, to
facilitate open data exchange
• Minimizes the negative impact
of name changes or common
names
• Link to other author
identifiers, such as Scopus ID
or ResearcherID
• Disambiguate existing
publications in existing citation
indexes, including:
– Web of Science
– Scopus
– MLA International Bibliography

15. Funding
Agencies
Other
Research
Identifiers
Research
&
Scholarly
Societies
Publishers
/
Manuscript
Submissio
n Systems
Repositorie
s & More
Universitie
s &
Research
institutions
ORCID is a hub connecting the research
landscape

18. Profile fatigue
• Proliferation of
“profiles”
• Researcher
confusion
• How do you best
maintain your
scholarly
identity?
18

19. Works cited
Allen, Elizabeth (2015). “Researcher #profilefatigue –what it is and why it’s so exhausting.”
ScienceOpen blog. Retrieved from http://blog.scienceopen.com/2014/09/researcher-
profilefatigue-what-it-is-and-why-its-exhausting/
Bryant, R. (2013). I registered for my ORCID iD. . . now what? ORCID Blog. Retrieved from
https://orcid.org/blog/2013/12/05/i-claimed-my-orcid-id-now-what
Fortney, K., & Gonder, J. (2015). A social networking site is not an open access repository.
Retrieved December 3, 2015, from http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-
social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/
Heller, L. (2015). What will the scholarly profile page of the future look like? The Impact
Blog. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved from
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/16/scholarly-profile-of-the-
future/
Ward, J., Bejarano, W., & Dudás, A. (2015). Scholarly social media profiles and libraries: A
review. LIBER Quarterly, 24(4), 174–204.

20. Options for online profiles
Rebecca Bryant, PhD
Visiting Project Manager, Research Information
Services
University Library
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2753-3881