What is digital identity?
Digital identity is quite simply your presence on the Internet. Digital identity is created proactively, by creating content, images, videos, establishing dialogue with other professionals and research groups with a presence in your field of knowledge beyond scientific publication. The following video gives an overview of what it is and what its benefits are:
What is digital identity?
What is your online reputation and personal brand as a researcher?
- Today, the concepts of personal brand and personal branding are commonplace on social media, but not very well known in the scientific sphere.
- Personal branding is based on a business management concept and refers to the management of one's own image as if it were a brand.
- Researchers increasingly need to stand out in some way to ensure that their work is visible and not hidden amongst everyone else's.
- The personal brand of a researcher is made up of the values, skills, personality and experiences that shape how they are as a person and how they work as a professional.
- To a certain extent we are all judged by what we can contribute to a group or community, which in the case of researchers refers first to the scientific community and second to society.
The advantages of personal branding for researchers
- It helps you to meet your goals: managing your personal brand allows you to be the one who is in control of your image as a researcher. It makes you be proactive and learn to achieve your personal and professional goals.
- It allows you to be recognized: this means being valued for your work and your scientific knowledge.
- Networking: it helps you expand your contact network. This results in more access to resources for your next projects.
- It improves employment: although the field of research is extremely bureaucratic, increasing the quantity and quality of your contacts allows you to access privileged information and job opportunities.
- It improves content: sharing your research with professional and non-professional publics provides you with feedback you can use to optimize your research.
- It increases your impact in the real world: your papers and publications will have more impact by adding value and solutions to communities and disciplines.
Building your digital profile
Author identifiers
Your unique author ID will be with you throughout your research career and is used to:
- Avoid ambiguity and confusion over authorship and, thus, dispersion of the scientific output produced by the same author.
- Improve and guarantee connection between the existing scientific output retrieval, collection and indexing systems, and thereby link referenced research activities in different information systems.
- Improve communication with the scientific community (submission of articles to publishers and documents to institutional repositories, etc.).
- Enable participation in internal, national and international calls for grants.
As publications are indexed in scientific production databases, authors are assigned other IDs that these databases generate automatically.
ORCID
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ORCID allows every researcher to be identified unequivocally. Creating your ORCID iD is simply a matter of individually signing up on the ORCID website (free of charge).
Academic and professional social media
Academic and professional social media enable you to disseminate your publications, obtain social impact statistics or indicators, and interact with other experts. To optimize your activity on social media, we recommend the following tips:
Profile creation:
- Register your profile.
- Add a logo as your avatar.
- Complete the abstract and clearly define your field of research.
- Include your author identifier in your profile.
- Link your personal website and blogs.
- Link your personal social media profiles.
Activation:
- Attract authors as followers.
- Attract reviewers as followers.
- Build a community:
- Invite.
- Like.
- Comment.
- Share.
- Publish events.
- Find similar groups.
Routines:
- Complete all the fields: abstract, keywords, etc.
- Upload articles.
- Analyse metrics:
- Number of readers.
- Number of citations.
- Readers over time.
- Level of the readers.
- Disciplines of the readers.
- Author keywords.
- Related articles.
- Identify trends.
Remember that you can consult the UOC Social Media Usage and Style Guide for more guidance on this matter. And also remember to check the publishing policies of the journals where you have published your research, on Sherpa Romeo portal, for example. But bear in mind that you cannot deposit and share your articles in every network. Look at the case of ResearchGate.
In October 2017, several publishing houses (ACS, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer) asked the academic social network ResearchGate to remove articles published by them from the platform as they were violating intellectual property laws. It is estimated that ResearchGate will have to delete 7 million documents, which represents around 40% of the total volume of the platform.
In fact, publishing policies exist which prohibit the automatic archiving of the final published versions of an article on platforms of this type. When authors sign a contract with a publishing house, exploitation rights (reproduction and distribution) over the work are often assigned on an exclusive basis, which means that, without the permission of the publisher, the authors cannot disseminate the work through any other channel. For more information on the publication policies of publishing houses, consult the databases Sherpa Romeo, DOAJ and Dulcinea, and, if you are still not sure, contact The Library Replies.
How can you publish your articles in open access while respecting publishing policies?
The UOC has its institutional repository, the O2, for publishing the full text of research and educational documents. The Library team checks the policies of publishing houses and publishes the works in accordance with the same. It is good practice to link the articles of social media or academic platforms to the version deposited in the institutional repository. The O2 provides a permanent URL which guarantees access to the document indefinitely.
Finally, remember that in order to comply with the open access requirements of the various funding bodies (Horizon 2020, Spanish National Plan, etc.), you must deposit the articles in a repository and not on academic sharing platforms such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. On the Library web page you will find a section dedicated to open access, with specific information on publishing your work in the O2.
More information:
Publishers seek removal of millions of papers from ResearchGate
ResearchGate Restricts Access to Nearly 2 Million Articles
Academic networks
Google Scholar
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Google Scholar allows you to monitor the citations your articles receive. It provides the total number of citations received (cumulatively and by publication), the year-by-year evolution and author-level metrics (h-index; i10-index).
Publons
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It is the digital platform of Clarivate Analytics, the company that owns the major academic database Web of Science, and it allows researchers to create and maintain their public profile as authors of articles and peer reviews.
Mendeley
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Disseminate scientific output to researchers with similar interests; Strengthen researchers' digital identity, thanks to their professional researcher profile; Discover new collaborators; See the latest developments in subjects of interest; Recommend articles and groups related to the field of research; Improve the visibility of scientific output because Mendeley's references are indexed on Google Scholar; Share documents with other Mendeley contacts and researchers by email; Participate in and collaborate with private, restricted-access groups to share references/PDFs.
Microsoft Academic
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An academic search engine that also allows you to search by knowledge area and find lists of authors, journals and conferences. Science outreach journals are included in its results. It offers advice on search criteria with semantic markup. Once a search is complete, you can filter the results. It has been created to compete with GS. It allows you to create a researcher profile.
Academia
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It is a free social network whose aim is to connect scientists, offer them a platform to share their research projects and make it easy to follow articles relevant to their fields of study. This thematic social network is made of up 18 million users and has more than 5 million scientific publications from all around the world. Academia.edu is committed to open access for science and aims to revolutionize the traditional peer review publishing process as it allows the publication of the full text of books, articles, drafts and additional materials to accelerate the visibility of research that has been conducted.
Research Gate
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This academic network was created in 2008, and by 2016 it had already garnered more than 9 million users from all around the world. According to a variety of studies, ResearchGate is the network with the largest number of active users, although its closest rival, Academia.edu, reported that in January 2016 it had a total of 34 million users, of whom less than a third are classified as active users.
Humanities Commons
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This open-access repository and social network, which is offered free of charge as a non-profit organization, specializes in humanities. Its objective is to improve the impact of the scientific production of researchers and offer them a space to debate, collaborate and even create their own personal website on WordPress.
Knowmetrics Network
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The Knowmetrics Network aims to create an independent, open knowledge social network to increase the visibility of the work of the research community in the areas of Social Sciences and Digital Humanities in order to contribute to the generation of new projects and alliances between their participants from all around the world. It was created as a result of the research project "Knowmetrics: knowledge assessment in the digital society" funded by the BBVA Foundation's grant programme for scientific research teams in 2016.
Professional networks
LinkedIn
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A professional social network with the potential to disseminate research by, for example, creating groups, sharing knowledge, acting as a bridge between researchers, journalists and community managers.
Twitter
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A microblogging social network. It is the fastest social network to comment on live events and disseminate messages about initiatives, results and ideas.
