Measuring Your Research Impact: Author IDs

1. Establish an Author ID
2. Learn about Author Impact metrics
3. Learn about Journal Impact metrics
4. Identify databases that provide citation metrics and analysis
5. Where to publish resources
6. Join online research communities to expand your network

Over the course of a researcher’s career, he or she might publish under a variety of names. Name changes due to marital status or simply the use of initials versus full name vary per publication requirements. Also, our name is not as unique as we’d like to believe – other researchers may share the same first and last names and more commonly, share the same last name with the same first and middle name initials, e.g., Michael Robert Greenleaf vs. Michelle Renee Greenleaf.

Establishing a persistent digital identifier will distinguish your works (articles, books, data sets, etc.) from other researchers that happen to share your name. So, before you delve any further in to the world of citation metrics, it is recommended that you:

• Sign up for an ORCID Identifier (http://orcid.org): ORCID users grant the tool permission to exchange information with other scientific profile services including SciENcv, PubMed's My Bibliography, and ResearcherID.
  • To learn more about ORCID and tips for registering, visit the ORCID Knowledge Base.

• Get a ResearcherID (http//www.researcherid.com): Yes, another unique identifier that offers a powerful bibliometrics tool to track the number of times your works have been cited in the Web of Science database and generates your h-index. ResearcherID also provides useful analysis tools for visualizing the collaboration networks by author, organization and country. USUHS has access to the Web of Science database via the LRC's website.

  • ResearcherID is widely accepted by major publishers, such as BMJ, Science, Nature and many others.
  • Scopus, Web of Science's major competitor, provides a similar tool called Scopus Author ID. It provides features similar to ResearcherID and is also ORCID compliant. At this time, the LRC does not subscribe to this database.​

Create a Google Scholar My Citations Profile (http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=new_profile&hl=en): The My Citations feature in Google Scholar allow you to identify and track your citations. Google Scholar provides tools to calculate numerous citation metrics.

• For more information, go to the Google Scholar Citations help.