Researcher portals
A researcher portal is a website that attempts to list all the publications of a given researcher, and calculate citation statistics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these websites can be useful tools for getting your work noticed. Conversely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field.
Google Scholar Citations
Google Scholar itself is an incredible resource covering journal articles, working papers, books, and almost everything else a scholar might cite. Google Scholar Citations uses Google Scholar data to provide information about all the outputs from a researcher. Some examples are Andrew Gelman and Di Cook. My profile is also there. 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, 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 at the top of the search results.
To set up your profile, go to scholar.google.com/citations. 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 wish Google would use the information provided by these edits to correct their Google Scholar database.
Semantic Scholar
An alternative to Google Scholar is Semantic Scholar. The coverage is not quite as broad as Google Scholar – it misses working papers unless they are on arXiv. On the other hand, there are some useful tools, including AI-generated summaries that are quite good. It is also easy to follow cited papers, and citing papers, along the citation tree. Related papers are also identified, so it is possible to explore further afield than just direct citations. You can follow individual authors, and set up alerts for new citations of specific papers. Citations are classified as “highly influential”, “background”, “methods”, “results”, etc., so you can easily filter papers that have had a big impact, those that apply new methods, etc. One interesting difference is that Semantic Scholar automatically creates personal author pages for each author, without needing each researcher to set them up. Mine is here. My h-index on Semantic Scholar is 75, compared to 92 on Google Scholar, reflecting the broader coverage of Google Scholar.
All the rest
There are several other sites attempting to provide similar services, but none of them come close to Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar in useful features and usability. I’ve set up profiles on all of them, just to see how they work.
Web of Science (previously called Researcher ID): lists 234 of my publications, and gives my h-index as 61. This tends to miss books, R packages, working papers and book chapters, but has most of my journal articles. Links to online versions of the papers are provided. The “Clarivate Highly Cited” Awards are based on these citations.
ResearchGate: lists 364 of my publications (so there must be some double counting). I used to get a lot of unsolicited mail from this site, but that seems to have stopped. In any case, it does nothing that the other sites don’t do better.
Academia.edu: wants me to sign up for a premium account to do anything more than the basic. I had to block all the emails I was receiving from this site. Not interested.
Recommendations
Ignore the emails from ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc. Just hit delete and block them.
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.
Try Semantic Scholar. You might find it helpful.
Check that your Semantic Scholar author page is accurate. Spend 10 minutes editing your profile so it gives a little more information about you.