This presentation to postgraduate students at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, highlights the importance of creating research profiles ; the use of social media in scholarly communication ; Altmetrics ; Impactstory ; ResearcherID ; Twitter, etc.

1. IPGC Conference
24-25 Sept 2013
Raising your research
profile
Eileen Shepherd
Principal Faculty Librarian: Science & Pharmacy
Rhodes University Library

2. “As a graduate student
preparing for a career
in research,
you have two jobs:
(1) do some good research
(2) build a community around
your research topic.”
Phil Agre, Networking on the Network (2005)

3. How?
(amongst other things) ……
by networking and
becoming known

4. One way to do this is
by using technology
Some examples of technologies
researchers can use
 email
 websites
 online discussion groups
register on academic research sites
use social networking software

5. (1)Register on academic or
professional
research sites, e.g.:
ResearcherID
ResearchGate
Academia.edu
LinkedIn

6. http://www.researcherid.com
• a solution to author ambiguity problem
• as you are assigned a unique identifier
• manage publication lists, track citations &
your h-index
• showcase your publications
• identify potential collaborators

7. Free registration – do it today!

8. and put (South)African research
on the map!

9. Searching by institute (36 for
NMMU):

10. By author – Dr G Kerley (NMMU):

11. Citation metrics for Dr Kerley:

12. Get an e-badge, see collaborators, etc.

13. Analyse collaborators by country,
authors, institution, research area:

14. http://www.researchgate.net/
• Research visibility
• Connection with other researchers
• Collaboration with other researchers
• Stats and metrics for your research output

18. (2) Social networking for
researchers
Why on earth would
I want to do this?

19. A few reasons:
to raise your research profile
to get noticed & cited
to find collaborators
to measure your research impact (apart from
citations) by means of altmetric

20. Altmetric: a new way of
measuring research
impact
Every day, thousands of scholarly papers are
being discovered, discussed and shared.
.

21. Who collects the
information?

22. http://www.altmetric.com/
creates and maintains a cluster of servers that
watch social media sites, newspapers,
government policy documents and other sources
for mentions of scholarly articles.
“We bring all the attention together to compile
article level metrics”

23. Altmetric bookmarklet:

24. This is what it looks like in action:

26. http://impactstory.org/

28. So,

29. By sharing, using social
networking tools:
Twitter
Mendeley
Cite-u-Like
Google+
Delicious
Blogs
LinkedIn
Reddit
Facebook
and many more………………..

30. Publishers are starting to
implement social media options at
article level
Some examples:
Nature
PLOS
Wiley
Taylor & Francis

36. @RhodesResearch
https://twitter.com/RhodesResearch

37. Twitter feeds in RU LibGuides, e.g.
Biochem http://ru.za.libguides.com/

38. Thanks for listening
Questions, suggestions,
comments?