Scholarly Impact Challenge: Day 1: Author Identification Systems

Author ambiguity in the scholarly community is a persistent problem due to:

• One author publishing under multiple variations of the same name
• Common names
• Name changes, e.g. marriage
• Cultural differences in naming

Author Identification allows you to: 

• Distinguish yourself from other researchers with similar names
• Protect your work from misattribution
• Make your work more discoverable by others
• Generate citation counts and other metrics to measure your scholarly impact (a topic we'll explore on day 2 of this challenge)
• Minimize data entry when submitting research for publication or applying for grants

Set up multiple profiles.  The tools are not mutually exclusive; they pull data from different sources; the purpose varies.  The following three are the most widely used ones in STEM. 

Once you create profiles at these three services, the majority of subsequent publications you author and citations to your publications will be automatically added, and you can add the rest manually. Each of these services uses different sources and methods to track your publications and citations, so you will see different information on each service. It can be valuable to maintain profiles at several services to ensure others see all your academic efforts, and because each tool has slightly different functions.

Part 1: Register for an ORCID. Anyone can create an ORCID account.

1. Register for an ORCID  (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) using an email address you will continually have access to. This may be your @usc.edu email or another.

2. If you chose to use a non-USC email address, after registration, add your @usc.edu email to link your profile to USC.

Part 2: Create a Google Scholar profile. Anyone can create a Google Scholar Profile.

1. Go to the Google Scholar Profile set up page.

2. Create an account using the name you typically publish under. You may use a personal email or your USC email account. If you use your USC email, the words "University of Southern California" will automatically be added to your profile as your current institution.

Part 3: Claim your Scopus Author ID. Only those who have authored 2 or more publications indexed in Scopus have an author ID. If you do not meet this criteria, you can skip this step and consider yourself to have succeeded at this day's challenge by claiming profiles on two services.

1. Search Scopus Author Profiles for your profile. Scopus is a multidisciplinary sciences database that includes journal articles, datasets, conference proceedings, and books. Scopus Author IDs are created for any author with 2 publications in Scopus.

2. You will see a list of automatically generated profiles based on similar names. Review the list.

- If there is only one automatically generated profile that refers to you, click the name. From the profile, click "Create account" in the top right of the page. You MUST use a non-USC email address. Create a personal Scopus account and "claim" this author profile.

- If there is more than 1 automatically generated profile that refers to you, choose the best match from the list of results. From the profile, click "Create account" in the top right of the page. You MUST use a non-USC email address. Create a personal Scopus account and "claim" this author profile. Later, you can request to merge different profiles.  Review the Scopus FAQ to learn how to merge profiles.

If you already have accounts one or more of these services, try the advanced challenge.

Author identification systems are only useful if the information included is correct, and, if they are found by others! Review the bullet points below, and select 2 tasks to promote your profile(s) and 2 tasks to update your profile(s.

Promote your Profiles

- Add links to one or more of these profiles to your email signature.

- Add one or more of these profiles to your curriculum vitae or résumé.

- Add links to one or more of these profiles in other online services you use to promote yourself and your professional/scholarly work: LinkedIn, your personal webpage, your lab webpage, social media, etc.

- Add your ORCID to your SciENcv, a service supported by the National Library of Medicine that can generate biosketches for NSF and NIH grant applications.

Update Profiles

- Log in to your ORCID account. Add new publications, new funding (grants), and professional activities you have done, since last updating this profile.

- Log in to your Google Scholar Profile. Add new publications you have authored since last reviewing.

- Log in to your Google Scholar profile. This source automatically adds publications that it believes are authored by you, and makes mistakes with people with common names. Review the list of publications carefully and remove those that you did not author.

- Log in to your Scopus Author Profile. Once you have signed in to your Scopus Author profile, click Edit Profile:

a. Click on Documents on the left side of the page. Review the list of publications, grants, and preprints and remove those that you did not author.

b. Scroll to the bottom of the documents list to see this prompt:

Click Search for Missing Documents in Scopus. A popup box will appear allowing you to search by author, keyword, title, etc., to find items you have authored that are missing. Be aware that you can only add items that are indexed in Scopus: not all your publications will be.