Several platforms offer identifiers and profiles and we have describes some of the major ones on this page. Other platforms also allow posting or deposit of work content files to the site; we've chosen to list those on our Sharing Work page.
ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) is becoming the international standard identifier for scholars. It is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a method of linking research activities and outputs to them. It is interdisciplinary and not dependent on a particular publishing platform.
Faculty and students can register for an ID and link it to their BC identity at ORCID at BC. The letter to faculty from the Provost, University Librarian and Vice President, Information Technology, articulates the value of ORCID IDs for the Boston College community.
More information is available at our ORCID at BC guide.
Setting up a Google Scholar Profile is free. You can keep it private or make it public. Search Google Scholar to find your articles and add them to your profile.
As Google Scholar finds and indexes new articles by you, it will add them to your profile, or you can choose to review them first.
As your articles are cited by others, Google will add those citations to your profile also. You can click on the "Cited by" link under each article to see who has cited you.
The accuracy of citation metrics is determined by the underlying data, so keep in mind that Google Scholar does not index every publication.
Scopus, a subscription abstract and citation database that enables publication trend analyses, organizes the information it aggregates by assigning a Scopus Author ID to every person with work in it. Its coverage is most comprehensive in the STEM fields, and its tools offer H-Index comparisons, journal impact data, and other bibliometric information. Author misattributions sometimes occur in it, and so it is important to use the Scopus author feedback wizard to report these and collect all of your publications within a single author profile. Also, although the Scopus Author ID is the property of Scopus, it is now compliant with the freely available ORCID (see above), and integrating the two has advantages: your work, for example, will be searchable in Scopus under your ORCID ID, and Scopus will register within its database work pending publication that you note in ORCID. Here is more information about integrating your ORCID profile with your Scopus Author ID.
Mendeley, like Scopus, is owned by the Elsevier publishing corporation, and provides a mixture of reference citation, remote data storage, and social networking services. Its free version (with required registration) has two components: a desktop program in which you may search for publications, build collections of reference citations, and upload open versions of your published work; and a website where you may build your own author profile as part of a scholarly social network. Having an author profile allows you to follow other profiles, send messages to other users, share citation collections and your own work, and keep current on other users' activities via a 'feed'. Mendeley provides the option of integrating a Scopus Author ID into an author profile.
Researcher ID is a unique identifier, similar to ORCID, created by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) for use with their Web of Science databases. It was created as a proprietary system in 2008, to solve name ambiguity problems in research. It allows the scholar to get an ID and claim their Web of Science indexed publications.
Researcher ID is now also connected to ORCID, allowing export of Researcher ID claimed publications to the ORCID profile.
