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Scholarly Credentials Toolkit for TCNJ Faculty: Looking for a Scholar's Profile?

track your scholarly productivity; get help with reappointment, tenure, and promotion applications; find a scholar's profile or create your own

Table of Contents

Navigate this libguide from the TOC below or the blue tabs (and sub-tabs) above.

TCNJ Scholars

Please share your research via Gitenstein Library's digital repository. It will reach a wider audience including scholars and students in the Global South without fees or risk of compromising privacy. We can easily walk you through the process. Reach out to me for details.

Scholars' Profiles

Academia.edu and ResearchGate are popular in higher education (Ovadia, 2014). Both, however, are problematic. Concerns about privacy and the monetization of data shared on corporate social media (e.g., FaceBook, now Meta) apply equally to Academia.edu and ResearchGate. What is more, ResearchGate's RG score appears to be driven primarily by "members' engagement in the social network, and only secondarily by publications." I do not trust ResearchGate as an indicator of impact (Copiello and Bonifaci, 2018). Nor do I recommend either site for scholarly profiles. Consider instead the following services to find the profile of a scholar or to create your own.

Best bet:

  • ORCiD offers a "persistent digital identifier" that distinguishes one scholar from another in the sciences and several other disciplines (see my ORCID profile as an example). Scholars register to create a profile.

Also great:

  • Google Scholar first opened its service to any researcher interested in creating a profile in November 2011. Click here to create your own Google Scholar Citations profile. You will not find a Google Scholar profile for an individual unless that person has created one.
  • Impactstory (free) primarily tracks altmetrics but doubles as a space for scholars to create an "Impactstory Profile" (see example).

Next steps:

  • Figshare is a repository that allows researchers "to make all of their research outputs" available in one easily discovered and cited space. See an example profile.
  • ResearcherID (Web of Science) offers a similar service.

Note: ResearchGate entered into an interesting partnership with the publishing giant Sage on May 11, 2023.