Scholarly Communication

Build a Digital Scholarly Identity

Why do you need an online scholarly identity?

• To increase discoverability and citation of your work
• To communicate with others in your field
• To create research relationships and collaborations
• To improve the quality of your work

Increasing your scholarly impact is an iterative process that starts with building your scholarly identity. The tabs on the left are designed to walk you through the process step-by-step for a self-service experience. You'll find tutorials, templates, and more to help you build the story about your scholarship.

Disseminating scholarly research and creating a digital identity can be a daunting task.  The librarians here at USAFA have several key measures to help build and promote your scholarly imprint and boost the impact of your work.  

Before you begin completing steps that will enhance your scholarly profile, you may want to get a baseline measurement of your scholarly impact and digital identity right now.  After following certain steps to help you build your digital identity, you can repeat these steps to note the changes and improvements to the accessibility of your scholarship and the quality of your public digital identity. Throughout your career, check in on your "professional self" online, expand your reach and update areas that need attention.

An ORCID is a  unique16-digit personal identifier that is registered through ORCID.org, a non-profit organization that maintains the registry and website.That number can be attached to any published work that you author in order to help ensure proper attribution and citation of your work, which may help improve your overall scholarly impact. 

You can register for an ORCID at no charge on the ORCID.org website. Once registered, you may create a profile page that includes your education, place of employment, alternate names that you've published under, and list of works with links to any official online versions of that work. All of this information may be set to private, public, or trusted parties view only, if you like. 

The ORCID is expressed as an https URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), sometimes with the ORCID icon attached, as in the example below. This link will also take you to a sample profile page.

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097​

You can also get a customized QR code that is readable by hand-held scanners, or embedding code to add any website or social media pages. Each of these will take users to your ORCID profile page where they will find whatever attribution information you provide.

For a quick video on setting up an ORCID, see: ORCID 101 for Individuals

And for an overview of an ORCID records, see: A Quick Tour of the ORCID Record

Web of Science Researcher Profiles offers a service similar to ORCID, but with the additional benefit of being integrated with Web of Science (one of the largest research databases) and Endnote (a bibliographic management tool), which allows researchers to use those tools to search, link, and share articles with other researchers as well as maintaining a profile and list of works.

The main difference between Researcher Profiles and ORCID is that the former is a proprietary service of Clarivate, while the latter is a nonproprietary alternative run by a nonprofit organization.  Researcher Profiles may be of greater interest to those who publish in Clarivate Web of Science journals or who want their work to be more visible in Web of Science, particularly those in the sciences and social sciences. Many researchers use both services, however, and Researcher Profiles does allow you to associate your account with your ORCID profile. 

Google Scholar profiles are one of the most common tools used by researchers to track their citations, h-index, or G-index, find links to their published works, and receive alerts about new citations.  If you're gathering article or book metrics for your promotion & tenure dossier, a Google Scholar profile will be the first step in locating that information.

The video below from the University of Houston Libraries will walk you through the steps of setting up a Google Scholar profile.

After following these steps, we recommend that you set your profile so that it does NOT automatically update (see below). This will keep your profile from being accidentally populated with citations to work that is not your own.