Introduction

The world has long since entered the digital age, dragging nearly all scientific literature and data along with it. Online-only journals are exceedingly common today, if not the norm, and few subscribe to print versions of journals anymore. As a result of this paradigm shift in scientific publishing, it is easier than ever to directly claim credit for your work on accounts that you can manage. Citation tracking platforms provide a means of easy access for readers to your entire body of scientific contributions, increasing exposure of your work.

However, these systems are imperfect. They may erroneously include papers attributed to you that are not your work, or fail to include papers that are. Unless your parents tried way too hard when naming you, there are plenty of other scientists that share your name. Thus, manual curation is required to ensure that these pages accurately represent your works.

Common platforms to curate

Below is a list of some of the most common platforms that track scientific publications for researchers. The depth of coverage for citations on each article varies between sites, with Google Scholar generally having the most extensive coverage. It is worth noting that most sites are also rather opaque about how exactly they count citations, such as whether self-citations or non-academic citations (e.g., on a secondary article or blog post) are counted.

• Google Scholar
  • Once you have claimed/created your profile, you will need to manually verify that all included articles on your profile are correct.
  • It automatically combines pre-prints with the final published manuscript. If it fails to do that, you can manually merge the versions.
  • You can add keywords on your profile relevant to your research.
  • If desired, add co-authors from your manuscripts.
  • You can link to a personal website.
• Research Gate
  • Create an account and verify if articles are correct.
  • Offers an about me section where you can describe your current research goals.
  • You can link to a personal website.
• ORCiD
  • An ORCiD number is higly recommneded for any scientist as it assigns to you a unique identifier that can be linked to all of your publications, allowing easier indexing by these citation tracking platforms.
  • You can search for your articles or manually add them.
  • Also useful to add education and employment history here.
  • You can link to a personal website.
• SemanticScholar
  • A newer site that typically shows a lower citation count, but tracks what it refers to as “highly influential citations” that demonstrate your work has heavily influenced other researchers.
  • Same as with the others, manually select your articles. It seems to have lower article coverage than other sites so they may not be found. If so, you can request to have them added through your account settings.
  • You can link to ORCiD and a personal website.
• Web of Science (formerly Publons)
  • Not as commonly used and has some features paywalled.
• Scopus
  • Fairly new and also largely paywalled. Likely not worth curating.

Other considerations

Using the same profile picture on each site will allow readers to easily distinguish your work. Of course using a professional headshot is recommended.

Besides curating your publications on sites that automatically aggregate them, there are other worthwhile places to keep an exhaustive or abridged list of works. A personal, academic oriented website where you have full control over how your work is presented is great for maintaining a complete list of authorship (including unpublished abstracts) if you have the coding skills to do so, or you can use a template site. However, setting up a personal website is beyond the scope of this article.