Researcher Profile Guide : Introduction

Support for the Research Process

In addition to our collections, UW-Madison Libraries provide support for all steps in your research process, from the planning stages through publication, archiving your output, and maximizing your scholarly impact.

Visit our Research Support page to learn more!

Introduction to researcher profiles

Researcher profiles link an individual with their research outputs, funding, and affiliations. Some profiles require registration while others are generated within literature databases, but all allow for manual management. Librarians can help researchers build comprehensive profiles to showcase their work.

Investing your time into building your researcher profile in relevant platforms will help you:

Increase your online presence and make your research more visible
Broaden your research impact through shares, likes, follows and downloads of your work
Eliminate confusion over variants of your name and ensure your research is easily identifiable as belonging to you (not someone with a similar name)
Find and curate your citation metrics and h-index. *** For more information on metrics visit our Research Metrics guide
Connect and collaborate with other researchers
Meet funder requirements

This guide discusses six major researcher profiles (but many more exist). If you need assistance with a platform not listed here, our librarians can still help.

Creating Multiple Profiles

Why it is useful to maintain a profile in multiple systems (such as a Google Scholar Profile, and ORCID, and a Web of Science Researcher Profile):

While it does take an up-front time investment, maintaining multiple profiles helps make your work more discoverable in each system. For example, if you have a Google Scholar Profile you work will be more discoverable in Google Scholar, but your Google Scholar Profile will not make your work more discoverable in Web of Science.

Note -- ORCID is currently the only Researcher Profile system that can exchange data across platforms, including other profile systems, funders, and institutions.

Recommended actions:

Create an ORCID profile
Create and/or claim a profile in each platform where people would look to discover your work
Link all your profiles to your ORCID profile

Quick Comparison

Comparison of key elements across different researcher profiles
	ORCID	Web of Science Researcher Profile	SCOPUS Author Profile	Google Scholar Profile	Humanities Commons Profile
Creates Unique Author ID (i.e. string of numbers)	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Unique features	Full author control of profile Automated sharing of information with other systems (manuscript submissions, grant applications, and other profiles)	Author record and metrics within Web of Science Permits automated data sync with ORCID	Author record and metrics within Scopus Permits import of Scopus author data into ORCID	Google scholar is widely used and freely accessible Scholar citation metrics include books	Social networking, Connects to CORE repository
Maintained by	ORCID (non-profit)	Web of Science (Clarivate)	Scopus (Elsevier)	Google	MLA (non-profit)
Provides research metrics	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Requires user registration	Yes	Yes	No* *Creates profile automatically. Requires feedback for accuracy	Yes	Yes