A researcher por­tal is a web­site that attempts to list all the pub­li­ca­tions of a given researcher. Some por­tals also allow shar­ing papers, inter­act­ing with other researchers, cal­cu­lat­ing cita­tion sta­tis­tics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these web­sites can be use­ful tools for get­ting your work noticed. They can also func­tion as a de facto home page if you don’t already have a per­sonal web­site. Con­versely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field. How­ever, unless a site pro­vides a rel­a­tively com­plete list of your pub­li­ca­tions, and cov­ers a large pro­por­tion of the research com­mu­nity in your dis­ci­pline, it is of lim­ited value.

Lately, there seems to have been a lot of activ­ity going on with var­i­ous por­tal sites try­ing to get researchers to sign up for their ser­vice. Just this week I’ve had three dif­fer­ent ser­vices want­ing me to sign up. So I thought it was timely to review the var­i­ous options. I’ll start with the two best options.

Google Scholar Citations

This week, “Google Scholar Cita­tions” was pub­licly launched. Google Scholar itself is an incred­i­ble resource cov­er­ing jour­nal arti­cles, work­ing papers, books, and almost every­thing else a scholar might cite. Google Scholar Cita­tions is a place where all the out­puts from a researcher are listed. It pro­vides a way of list­ing your pub­li­ca­tions, track­ing cita­tions to your pub­li­ca­tions, com­put­ing cita­tion met­rics, etc. There is very lit­tle work in set­ting up a pro­file. When I did it, Google had auto­mat­i­cally iden­ti­fied all my pub­li­ca­tions. Noth­ing seemed to have been missed, and it even listed one paper I had for­got­ten I had written!

To see the pro­file of an exist­ing researcher, just search for their name on Google Scholar. If they have made their pro­file pub­lic, it will appear in the search results. Some exam­ples are Andrew Gel­man and Scott Arm­strong. My pro­file is also there.

To set up your pro­file, go to scholar​.google​.com/​c​i​t​a​tions. You may have to do some edit­ing of the results to merge ver­sions of the same pub­li­ca­tion, or to cor­rect some errors in the data­base. I have 142 pub­li­ca­tions listed and it took me about 10 min­utes to go through and make sure they were all correct.

Hope­fully, Google will use the infor­ma­tion pro­vided by these edits to cor­rect their Google Scholar data­base, although that isn’t hap­pen­ing yet.

Mende­ley

If you use Mende­ley, you will already have an online Mende­ley pro­file list­ing all the pub­li­ca­tions in your “My Pub­li­ca­tions” col­lec­tion. My page is here. When­ever you write a new paper, or have a paper accepted in a jour­nal, just update the details in Mende­ley, make sure the paper is in your “My Pub­li­ca­tions” col­lec­tion and your pro­file is auto­mat­i­cally updated.

With Mende­ley, you have to add every out­put your­self, whereas Google Scholar finds and adds out­puts for you. But if you use Mende­ley any­way, this is no extra work. I use Mende­ley as the back­end to my CV (it gen­er­ates the bib file that is used in my CV) so the Mende­ley pro­file is a side-​​benefit rather than rep­re­sent­ing addi­tional work. Mende­ley lists 152 pub­li­ca­tions for me — it includes a few bib­li­cal writ­ings that haven’t made it onto Google Scholar.

A nice fea­ture of Mende­ley is that it allows you to share pdfs of your papers.

Mende­ley does not track cita­tions like Google Scholar, but it does pro­vide some excel­lent facil­i­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion. You can share papers with your con­tacts, and set up groups to allow for research col­lab­o­ra­tion and discussion.

All the rest

There are sev­eral other sites attempt­ing to pro­vide sim­i­lar ser­vices, but none of them come close to Mende­ley or Google Scholar Cita­tions in use­ful fea­tures and usabil­ity. I’ve set up pro­files on all of them, just to see how they work.

• ResearcherID: lists 81 of my pub­li­ca­tions. This is one of the old­est options and I set up my pro­file a cou­ple of years ago, and now can’t remem­ber how much work it was. It misses my books, R pack­ages, work­ing papers and book chap­ters, but has most of my jour­nal arti­cles. Links to online ver­sions of the papers are pro­vided. OK, but lim­ited com­pared to Mende­ley and Google Scholar Citations.
• Microsoft Aca­d­e­mic Search: links 105 of my papers. This is Microsoft’s answer to Google Scholar. The data­base looks like it might be cleaner than Google Scholar, but a lot of cita­tions are missed and my expo­nen­tial smooth­ing mono­graph is nowhere to be seen. Also, work­ing papers are missing.
• Research­Gate: lists 74 of my pub­li­ca­tions, lists the “Jour­nal of Epi­demi­ol­ogy” as my top jour­nal (where I have two papers) instead of the IJF (where I have 17 papers), and requires me to upload all my papers man­u­ally. No thanks.
• Acad​e​mia​.edu: lists 58 of my papers and couldn’t find any more when I searched. So I would have to add the rest man­u­ally. Very lim­ited infor­ma­tion about any paper avail­able. Why are they still in business?
• iamRe­searcher: lists 45 of my pub­li­ca­tions, barely ¹⁄₃ of what I have on Mende­ley and noth­ing from 2011 except for the MComp pack­age for R. It also lists a work­ing paper from 2010 which never existed, with a list of coau­thors who have never writ­ten a paper with me. With a name like “iamRe­searcher”, I should have expected this.

Rec­om­men­da­tions

1. Ignore the emails from ResearcherID, Research­Gate, Acad​e​mia​.edu and iamRe­searcher. Just hit delete. Microsoft doesn’t really pro­mote their site, so they don’t send emails to annoy us.
2. Set up a page on Google Scholar Cita­tions. It’s not much work and makes your work more vis­i­ble. It also allows you to track cita­tions which are use­ful if you apply for promotion.
3. Use Mende­ley and put all your own pub­li­ca­tions in the “My Pub­li­ca­tions” col­lec­tion. Then spend 10 min­utes edit­ing your Mende­ley pro­file so it gives a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion about you.
4. If you don’t have a per­sonal web­site, use your Mende­ley pro­file as your per­sonal home page.

Related Posts:

• Fol­low­ing authors on Google Scholar
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references
• Search­ing the research literature
• Your name is your brand
• Google scholar alerts