This blog post was contributed by Alison Moore, Digital Scholarship Librarian & Manager, Knowledge Mobilization Hub at SFU Library. 

Looking to present a polished online presence? Want to make sure that your research is easily accessible online, but not sure what to do? There are a lot of different options when it comes to sharing your work, and it can be difficult to know how to get started. We recommend the following three steps to help you raise your research profile. 

1. Claim your work: Register for an ORCID iD

An Open Researcher and Contributor ID (more commonly known as an ORCID iD) is a unique numeric identifier that helps set you apart from other researchers with similar names or affiliations. Registering for an ORCID iD is a quick way to get credit for your work: it takes just a few seconds to sign up, and linking your publications takes just a few minutes. 

ORCID iDs are particularly helpful for folks who have common names, anyone who has changed their name throughout their research career, and researchers who hold multiple affiliations. 

2. Make your research available: deposit your publications in Summit

Thinking about uploading your work to a commercial scholarly network like Academia.edu or ResearchGate? We recommend depositing your research in Summit, SFU’s Institutional Repository instead. Summit is a free, openly accessible repository that is indexed in Google Scholar. Work that you share in Summit can be downloaded, read, and shared by anyone who has an internet connection. Click here to learn more about why and how to deposit your work in Summit. 

Once publications are in Summit, you can link to them on your ORCID and Google Scholar Profiles.

3. Showcase your citations: set up your Google Scholar Profile

A Google Scholar Profile is an easy way to provide access to your publications and highlight your publication metrics all in one place. 

1. Create a Google account: you need a gmail account in order to set up a profile, so if you do not yet have a Google account, you can create one here: https://accounts.google.com/signup. 
2. Create your basic Google Scholar profile: go to Google Scholar at https://scholar.google.co.ca/, log in to your Google account (top right of page) and click the “My Profile” link at the top left of the page to get your account setup started. Follow the instructions to create your profile adding your name, affiliation, subject area, and SFU email address (your email won't be visible, but it's used to confirm that you're affiliated with SFU).  
3. Find your publications: Google Scholar will then search for articles that it thinks are by you and ask whether you want them added to your profile. Some will be by you, and others may be by academics with the same or similar names, but Google is pretty good at distinguishing subject areas. If there are publications missing from your profile, you can search for them by choosing the ‘Add’ and then ‘Add articles’. You can search by article/report title or by DOI. 
4. Manually add missing publications: if you still can’t find your output or it is not available online, you can use the ‘Add’ option and then ‘Add article manually’ to create a record. You can give Google permission to automatically update the list of articles in your profile if you wish (it doesn’t often get things wrong, and you can remove articles incorrectly attributed to you if it does).
5. Make your profile public: save your profile and tick the box to make the profile public. This will mean that your profile will appear in Google search results and your research will be more discoverable. 

If you’re interested in learning more about online profiles and researcher visibility, check out our research guide, which covers topics like commercial scholarly networking sites, academic blogging, and social media.