Participate in the Scholarly Impact Scavenger Hunt!
Each day of Open Access Week, work through the activities below to help you as a researcher better understand and manage your online scholarly presence, as well as the impact and reach of your research.
Day 1: Register your ORCID and associate it with your UNCW identity (or pick a different researcher ID, such as Humanities Commons)
What is ORCID?
- An open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique research identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to those identifiers
- ORCID provides a standard unique author identifier (ORCID iD) that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized
- ORCID Registry aims to prevent authorship confusion
In short, an ORCID iD is a unique 16-digit researcher ID number associated with you. An ORCID iD is increasingly requested by publishers, funding agencies, and others that want to ensure that publications, funding, and other forms of scholarly work are accurately associated with you. An ORCID iD is used by certain University systems, allowing you to enter information once and reuse it wherever it's needed. Getting it done now means you don't have to worry about it later! For more information and registration instructions, check out this ORCID guide!
Day 2: Claim your Google Scholar profile
Today's challenge is to make the most of Google Scholar by claiming your profile.
If you have ever searched for scholarly literature on the web, you have almost certainly encountered Google Scholar. But did you know that this tool can also be used to keep track of your own publications (and publications that cite your work)?
Here is how to do it:
- Go to scholar.google.com
- Click on "My Profile" in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. Add your name, affiliation, and email to have your profile display as "verified."
- Google Scholar will give you a list of publications it thinks is written by you. Add, delete, and merge publication records as needed. Then click Next.
- Choose whether you'd like Google Scholar to automatically add new publications to your profile, and whether you want your profile to be public and searchable (recommended!).
- You can also add a profile picture, co-authors, and follow other scholars of interest. It's up to you!
Day 3: Edit your Scholars@UNCW profile
Scholars@UNCW is designed to showcase the scholarship and research activities of current UNCW faculty, to share areas of research expertise, and to connect faculty and researchers with common interests to each other. Scholars@UNCW can display your scholarly work, visualize co-author networks and Altmetrics, and make your profile as a scholar discoverable to the community, allowing for increased opportunities for you to collaborate, communicate the impact of your research, and browse the work on other researchers on campus. For more information and to edit your profile, check out our Scholars@UNCW guide!
Day 4: Preserve and share your work with a digital repository
Perhaps you’ve shared article pre-prints or other forms of scholarly work with your colleagues over social media or email, or posted them to your personal website. Using a digital repository can make the common activity of exchanging work with colleagues easier and more stable.
By depositing your work in UNCW's Institutional Repository or a disciplinary repository, you'll get:
- A stable URL for the work that you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, etc. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work. You also won’t have to worry about broken links, or about migrating and re-posting your work to a new web page if you move to a new institution, or if your website moves to a new platform.
- Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others
- Some form of feedback about how the work has been used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.
For UNCW Institutional Repository deposits, contact Sam Winemiller. Otherwise, you're welcome to deposit your work in a preprint or disciplinary repository!
Day 5: Find appropriate impact metrics
Today we’ll look at concrete ways the impact of that work might be measured, focusing on this question: How do you get from the work you do, to an appropriate metric for measuring and communicating its impact? Let's take a look at the Metrics Toolkit.
- The Metrics Toolkit, launched in 2018, is a great tool to help you navigate the research metrics landscape. Take a few minutes to explore this site. You might want to browse all of the included metrics, check out use cases for this tool, or read up on the Editorial Board, who take responsibility for maintaining and updating this tool.
- Go to "Choose Metrics" and select "Type of Impact | Research Object | Discipline of Your Work" from the drop-down menus. Then click "Filter" to see which metrics are suggested to meet your need. Your results will likely include a mixture of bibliometric indicators, such as citations-based measures of impact, and less traditional suggestions, such as blog mentions or Mendeley readers. Do any of the suggestions surprise you?
- Click on at least two of the suggested metrics and read about them, especially focusing on the Appropriate use cases, Limitations and Inappropriate use cases”'
- Pick at least one metric you may be able to use in your work!
This material has been adapted from the University of Michigan research impact challenge LibGuide created by Rebecca Welzenback, January 15 2019 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/