Research metrics and publishing: Author IDs & Profiles

There are many academic and professional networking sites which provide a platform to:

• Create a profile to increase the visibility and accessibility of your research output
• Share papers and follow colleagues or peers to view their research, identify potential collaborators and
  grow your network
• Generate citation metrics which indicate the reach of your work

Social networks can augment traditional means of scholarly communication, but with so many options available you should be clear on why you are using them and what you hope to achieve. 

Make sure you understand the shortcomings if you choose to entrust your research to a networking site -  papers uploaded may not be able to be removed if you change your mind later, and you (and those in your contact lists) may be subject to unsolicited emails or spam.

Google Scholar Profile

Industry leaders and other employers may search for potential employees with the talent they are looking for using internet search engines. Having a Google Scholar profile means that you are discoverable and have a platform to present your unique skills and expertise. Create a profile using the "My Citations" link in Google Scholar. Content can be updated automatically or manually. Make your profile Public so it appears in Google Scholar results. Google Scholar citation metrics can often appear inflated in comparison with ResearcherID and Scopus Author ID. This is a well recognised issue so it is important to clean up your record and remove incorrect entries.

Your profile can help you stay up to date with when you've been cited. Simply use the "Follow" feature and "Create alert" so you'll get an email whenever you receive a citation.

You can also stay up to date with key peers or collaborators. Go to their Google Scholar profile page and click "Follow new articles" or "Follow new citations" to receive an email every time they receive a new citation or publish a new article.

Publons is a free service for researchers to track and demonstrate their impact as authors, journal editors, and peer reviewers, in one place. 
Manage the information on your public profile to make it easy for administrators, funders, journal editors and fellow researchers to see your bio, top publications, citation metrics, peer review history, and journal editing work. Any publications you add to your Publons profile will then be linked to your Web of Science ResearcherID when anyone searches for you on Web of Science. Publons uses the Web of Science Core Collection — 21,000 journals hand-selected and reevaluated by expert editors — to calculate citation counts and h-indices.

Find out more

Academia.edu 

Academia.edu is a for-profit company. It is an academic networking site that allows you to:

• Create a profile that will appear in Google searches
• Upload full-text publications (within copyright) that will be indexed by Google Scholar
• Add your CV as well as presentations, blog posts, websites and other non-traditional research outputs
• Nominate your research interests to customise your newsfeed and follow like-minded scholars
• Access your analytics page that provides an overview of visitors and metrics on views.
• Introduced in 2016 a 'premium' service that charges members money for citation data analysis:
  "Academia Premium also includes features such as Mentions, Readers, Advanced Search and Extra Analytics, in addition to Academia.edu Searches." 

For examples see Monash University on Academia.edu

More than 51 million academics have signed up with Academia.edu worldwide.

ResearchGate 

ResearchGate is a for-profit company. It provides a free social network for scientists in which you can:

• Create a detailed profile
• Upload full-text publications (within copyright), or upload work for comment or review
• Nominate your research expertise and endorse researchers in your network
• Follow scholars or topics, comment or review the work of others, and ask and answer research questions
• Track engagement with your work through citations or views, find who is reading your work and their country and institution.

ResearchGate has more than 12 million researchers.

Humanities Commons Network is a project of the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association.
It's development was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

• a non-profit network for Humanities scholars
• create a profile
• share and discuss papers
• also has an open access repository
• promotes open access, open source research

Mendeley 

Mendeley is a free reference manager and an academic social network owned by Elsevier.

• Create a profile and showcase your work
• Store and organise your research, and share work (within copyright) publicly or privately
• Follow other members and create and participate in public and private groups
• Measure your article performance with a range of authoritative metrics, including downloads and citations
• Altmetrics data displayed in a PlumAnalytics print for all Mendeley members

LinkedIn and LinkedIn for Higher Ed Professionals

LinkedIn is a global, career and industry oriented, social networking service for all professionals. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft.

Employers can post jobs and job seekers can post their CVs. LinkedIn profiles may be ranked highly in search engine results.

LinkedIn users include businesses and individuals who can create profiles and connections to others who may represent their real-world professional relationships.

Users can invite anyone to make a connection. It is recommended that users only accept connection requests from people that they know, or from those for which the connection may be mutually beneficial. ​

LinkedIn has more than 300 million registered users.