Dr Alistair Legione

Dr Alistair Legione

Lecturer in Veterinary Microbiology and Public Health at the University of Melbourne

Building your Online Research Profile - Google Scholar

4 minute read

Published:

The goal of improving your online profile is that when people search your name, you’ll appear near the top (or ideally at the top) of the search results. I’d say globally the majority of people at time of writing will be searching using Google, so it makes sense to set up your Google Scholar profile too. Since lots of people search for papers through this service nowadays too, having a scholar page has the added benefit of adding a ‘clickable’ link to your name when your papers are searched. This link takes them through to your profile page where they can find even more of your papers! How convenient.

This is Part 3 in the ‘Building your Online Research Profile’, to find all posts in this series, click here

What you need to start with

Not much! If you have a Gmail account you’re almost done. The following will help you complete a full profile.

  • A Gmail account
  • An institutional (e.g. Univeristy) email account
  • A photo, ideally the same one you’ve used in your other profiles
  • 4 - 5 keywords that describe your research interested (e.g. Microbiology, Salmonella, Genomics)
  • A good idea of which papers you’ve published!

Setting up your Google Scholar profile

  1. Go to the Google Scholar page
  2. Click on ‘My Profile’, you’ll be taken to a set up page like the below Google Scholar Set Up Image
  3. Add your institutional email (or you won’t be able to set up your page), and add a webpage such as your institutional profile page
  4. Add some broad keywords that describe the field you work in
    • These become hyperlinks to find other Scholars that work in the same field
  5. You’ll be presented with all the papers Google thinks you’ve published, based on your name. Go through the list and remove any papers that don’t belong to you, if you have an uncommon name this should be pretty straight forward Claiming papers for your scholar profile
  6. Finally you’ll have the option to update your profile automatically, or set it so that Google will send you an email to review new papers of yours that it finds. Again if you have an uncommon name, stick with the automatic updates. Keep your profile up to date

Your profile is now almost complete, you just need to add your photo (simply click on the empty profile image), and tidy up any duplicate papers.

Tidying up your Google Scholar profile

If you’ve ever published a pre-print, using a service such as BioRxiv for example, then your paper will appear in your Google Scholar profile in both forms (pre-print and final publication). To merge the citations into one for metric purposes, you can easily select the appropriate papers by clicking on the checkbox on the left hand side of each entry. Following this, click on the ‘merge’ option that appears in the top toolbar, and select which of the versions you’d like to retain in your profile.

Using your Google Scholar Profile

Scholar profiles are a great succinct way of finding your current metrics, including citations broken down by year, h index (the number (h) of papers with at least h citations), and i10 index (the number of papers with over 10 citations). You can also sort your research output by year of publication or number of citations, and easily select papers and export the citations in various formats.

A few days after you’ve set up your profile, check back in and you’ll notice that Google is suggesting ‘Co-authors’, which it populates by linking the papers you’ve claimed with those who also have Google Scholar profiles attached to those same works.

If you want to utilise your Google Scholar profile even further, why not try out my RShiny tool ‘Scholar Plot’, which can be used to plot research metrics by year and produce a table of your research broken down by impact (Impact factor of journal + citations per year since publication). The plot you can find on my Publications page was generated using this tool.

Next up in our Building Your Online Research Profile series is Twitter

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Quick tips for using ffmpeg for video editing

4 minute read

Published:

In this brave new world of 2020, many of us are finding we have to use Zoom or other similar video conferencing software tools to teach classes. Then we wish to take those recordings and quickly edit them to trim, compress, and upload them to an online server. I’ve found the command line tool ffmpeg to be extremely helpful in this endeavour. Below are a few quick commands you can use to get your recording from its raw form in to a final version in just a few commands.

Building your Online Research Profile - Twitter

14 minute read

Published:

Twitter is the social media hub of choice for a vast array of academics. It’s a great place to share your latest work, ask questions of experts, communicate your research field to the general public and engage in the general discourse of your community. It can potentially be a hive of politically charged vitriol too, but we can hopefully avoid swimming in those circles more often than not.

This guide will take you through the basics of setting up a profile, and working through the basics of a ‘tweet’, your ‘timeline’, your ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. There is a decent amount of platform specific terminology (much of it general parlance for social media these days), but we’ll get through it together.

Building your Online Research Profile - Find an Expert

5 minute read

Published:

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.

Building your Online Research Profile

4 minute read

Published:

Why do you, as a researcher, need to have an online presence? Why can’t your research just speak for itself? Perhaps it can, but unless you’re the lead in a niche field, the majority of us are probably left to work in obscurity. Consider this though, what have you tried to find on the internet in relation to research? You may have read an interesting paper and you want to find out what else this researcher has worked on, maybe they’re no longer at the institution listed on the paper, perhaps you want to contact them to work on something together?

It’s logical to think that others have used the internet to try to find you!