Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations.

Gasparyan AY, Nurmashev B, Yessirkepov M, Endovitskiy DA, Voronov AA, Kitas GD. Researcher and author profiles: opportunities, advantages, and limitations. Journal of Korean medical science. 2017 Nov 1;32(11):1749-56.

Have you often found yourself wondering- “Are the online platforms I use for getting information all very similar, or are they different?” For instance, how do you know if PubMed is any different from Publons? Would ScienceDirect give you the same results as ScienceOpen? So many of you use PubMed, but how many of you know that ORCID issues unique identifiers for authors and contributor names in PubMed so that you don’t get ambiguous results?

Current research and practice trends mandate exhaustive and regular evaluations of research performance. In their special article Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations, Gasparyan et al. discuss the various websites which have now come up to aid the research community in their quest for updated, relevant information. The quality and comprehensiveness of information on these platforms go on to mark, as the authors say, the professionalism and scientific prestige of the creators and moderators.

The article establishes how, via global databases and platforms such as MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, chances of retrieving pertinent items and navigating through author profiles for evaluating them becomes a lot easier. Doing so is particularly important for publishers and editors since it would reduce chances of misconduct.

Upon reading the article, you will be familiarized with a host of such search platforms and databases which have created online tools to provide updated information on researchers and authors. You will learn about Scopus, ResearcherID, PubMed, Google Scholar Citations, ResearchGate, ORCID, Academia.edu and Publons.

The authors describe each of these platforms, offering interesting incites as they go about doing so. You learn the main functionality of each of these platforms. ResearchID and ORCID, for instance, issue unique identifiers. ScienceOpen, ResearchGate, Academia.edu all engage in scholarly social networking. Many of them also have functionalities that are unique. ScienceOpen for instance, offers gold open-access publishing. Mendeley, Zotero and CiteULike are there to help you manage your references. Publons ascribes editorial contributions and peer reviews.

The authors also discuss differences in the use of the scholarly platforms; rightly pointing out that each service covers less than 50% of author publication activity. They use different studies to establish this- one, for instance, studies 6,132 profiles on Google Scholar, Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley to find that while scholars engaged in the Social Sciences and Humanities depend mostly on Academia.edu, biologists usually go with ResearchGate for scholarly networking. The article tells you how uses of these platforms not only vary depending on subjects, but also demographics. You will also learn how the functionality and content coverage of each of these platforms varies from one to the other- an example being ResearchGate, which primarily focuses on archives of current articles of profile holders, and lacks visibility of historical papers.

We strongly recommend that you get acquainted with all the platforms so that  you know which of them will suit your interest best. So, do give it a read and familiarize yourself with all of them.

Click here for the Full Text

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Thanks to Swapnali Patil for finding this really useful article!

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