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Boost Your Scholarly Profile: Getting Started

Measure Your Current Professional Impact

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.  

Before you can tell your research story, you might want to see what you have already written.

After following certain steps to help you build your digital identity, you can repeat these steps to note the changes and improvement to the accessibility of your scholarship and the quality of your public digital identity.

Throughout your career, check in on your "professional self" online and update areas that need attention.  

Taking stock of the ways in which your scholarship is discovered, viewed, and used can help give you ideas on expanding your reach.

Updating your professional profile can help potential collaborators and scholars network with you while making your work more discoverable, and will yield more citations of your work in future studies.  

These improvements will not only provide you with a strengthened portfolio for promotion but ensure that your scholarship continues through collaborations and future research.

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Start With The Basics

Google (and Google Scholar) Yourself.

View how your professional profile and scholarship are seen online via the most-used search engine.

Google your name (hint: if you have a common name, you may want to also Google your affiliation with UTA, or any other institutions along with it).  Record the different places you appear and note which results come up first (LinkedIn, UTA website, etc). Are these sites up-to-date? What could be improved? What results do you wish would rise to the top?

Freely available databases sometimes provide citation counts. The most popular of these is Google Scholar. Do the same as instructed above. How many citations do you have for each publication? Are your articles easy to find? Are they accessible in full-text?  For more information on linking Google Scholar to UTA see http://libguides.uta.edu/googlescholar

Need (Don't Have) a Google Scholar Profile?

Creating and maintaining a Google Scholar Profile can increase the status and reach of your scholarship and research.  You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics.

  1. Create or sign in to your Google account to set up your Author Profile. Google recommends using a personal account so that your profile is independent from your institutional account. Note that accounts and email addresses are different. You will need to use your official UTA email in your profile since Google Scholar requires valid university email addresses.
  2.  Add your articles to your profile (or skip this step and do it later).
  3. Choose or decline automatic updating.
  4. Click the "Go to my profile" button.
  5. Your profile will default to private.  Click the "Make it public" link to change the status.  You can change the status at any time by clicking the "Edit" button and checking/unchecking the "Make my profile public" box.  

Now you're ready to explore and review your citations!  And don't forget to update your profile regularly.  See Google Scholar Citations for detailed setup instructions and further information.

Dig a Little Deeper

Web of Science

Web of Science is the recognized standard for citation searching. You can obtain a Researcher ID and use it to view/track publication history in ISI-listed publications, create citation reports, and calculate h-index. Web of Science indexes over 12,000 high impact journals in 250 disciplines, and includes:

  • Science Citation Index (1965 to present)
  • Social Science Citation Index (1965 to present)
  • Biological Abstracts (1969 to present)
  • Medline (1950 to present)
  • SciELO Citation Index (1997 to present)

Check Web of Science

  1. Access Web of Science through the library's Database's A-Z list
  2. Switch from Basic Search to Cited Reference Search (blue arrow dropdown box)
  3. Enter information about the cited work and click “Search”
  4. Select the results you would like to view and click "Finish Search" - the results list includes all the articles citing the author and work you searched
  5. Click on the title of the citing article to reveal more about the number of references the author cited, and how many times he or she has been cited.