Most researchers in a University system will have a staff profile page. Here, your contact information, a photo, and your research outputs are going to be listed. Also, for most institutions this will have a brief biography on who you are as a researcher. This can be a valuable first contact for people searching you out on the internet as a University profile is likely to be considered one of the more trustworthy sites when people are trying to find you.

This is Part 2 in the ‘Building your Online Research Profile’, to find all posts in this series, click here

Find an Expert

NOTE: This section is only relevant to staff at the University of Melbourne, if you’re interested in reading about other social media profiles, skip to the next section on Google Scholar.

The University of Melbourne’s research profile is called ‘Find an Expert’. Here is where you’ll find your biography, a headshot, some research keywords, your research papers and funded projects. That is, if you’ve kept it up to date. The method for adding information to these pages is via the University of Melbourne’s ‘Themis’ staff page and ‘Minerva Elements’ research repository. Minerva is the University’s way of consolidating a researcher’s grant income and research output, as well as a repository for housing post-prints of articles to maximise the audience that can access your work.

So, if someone searches for you on the internet, your University profile is a pretty good place to include some useful information! So there are a few things that you can do to easily and quickly populate this pages

Updating your biography and headshot

What you’ll need

• A photo (specifically a headshot in .jpg format, at least 120 x 120 pixels)
• A brief biography highlighting your research background and interests
• 3-4 broad keywords summarising your area of research (e.g. Microbiology), and 3-4 specific key terms (e.g. the species you focus on, or your topic of interest)

Below are the steps for updating your profile via Themis

1. Go to Themis and sign in
2. Click through several links in the menu page to get to your pubic staff profiles
   • Go to ‘UOM Research Self Service’ -> Themis Researcher Profile -> Public Staff Profile
3. Click on the menu option ‘Biography Details’
4. To the top text box, add your prepared biography
5. At the bottom of the page there is an option to add a photo, add the prepared photo and click ‘Save’ to make sure your changes are stored.
   • Note: as highlighted above, your photo needs to be in .jpg format, and only end in .jpg (not .JPG or .jpeg). The file name also needs to only contain letters, not punctuation or spaces (rename it to ‘photo.jpg’ or similar to ensure it works)

Your profile won’t update immediately, it normally takes several days before the system processes these changes.

Updating your research expertise

Find an Expert generates a word cloud of your research expertise, which can provide a nice snapshot of your research interests. However you have some say about what topics appear in this word cloud, as well as what your ‘primary research area’ is defined as.

1. In your Public Staff Profile, navigate to the ‘Research Expertise’ link
2. On this page you can enter the title of your primary research field (use your broad keywords) into the ‘Research Interest (free text)
3. Click ‘+Show’ to allocate Field of Research (FOR) codes and allocate these areas as primary or secondary research fields
4. Add more specific key words to the textbox labelled ‘Research Interest (additional keywords), separating phrases/topics with a comma (,)

Minerva Elements

Minerva Elements is the University of Melbourne tool for storing your publication output and grant success. Your Find an Expert profile is populated using the information you provide in this page. It can also be a great way to store your Post-Print publications. This is the Word Document (or PDF) of your accepted manuscript, which has undergone peer review but hasn’t been typeset in the Journal’s format. Storing your post-print is a great way to ensure your research work can be read by anyone, regardless of their access to Scientific Journal subscriptions.

Updating your Minerva profile

Every time you successfully obtain a grant, or publish a manuscript, Minerva will automatically update to include it, assuming at least that the grant was entered into the Themis grant submission workbench. For manuscripts, you must ‘claim’ them to make sure erroneous manuscripts by a namesake aren’t included in your profile.

1. Sign into Minerva Elements
2. Update your profile to include your ORCID and any other online journal repositories (e.g. Scopus, etc)
3. Claim (or reject) any papers that belong to you
4. Claim (or reject) any grants that belong to you
5. ‘Link’ publications to grants where appropriate
6. For each paper, select the button (indicated below with a purple arrow)

7. For each paper, Minerva will use SherpaRomeo database to determine the rules for what you can and can’t put online (example for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases below). Choose the file you want to upload (it may have found one for you online), select any necessary embargo periods, and upload.

   

You should now have a near complete Research Profile. Have a click through the other navigation options in both Minerva and Themis and update anything you can to complete your profile as much as possible.

Next up in our Building Your Online Research Profile series is Google Scholar