Building a research profile

A research profile helps people find your work, contact you, and judge your experience for jobs, PhD places and collaborations.

The basics

• ORCID, with all your outputs linked.
• Google Scholar profile, which tracks your papers and citations automatically (check it for wrongly added papers).
• A simple personal page: a short bio, your interests, papers with links, code, talks and a contact email.
• GitHub, with clean, documented repositories.

Metrics: use with care

• Citations count how often your papers are cited.
• The h-index, proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005, is the largest number h such that you have h papers each cited at least h times.
• The journal impact factor measures a journal's average citations, not the quality of any one paper in it.

These numbers vary hugely between fields and career stages, and can be gamed. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), from 2012, asks institutions not to use journal impact factors to judge individual researchers, and to assess the work itself. Thousands of organisations have signed it. The Leiden Manifesto (2015) gives ten principles for using metrics responsibly.

What actually builds a reputation

• Work that others can trust and reuse: solid methods, open code and data.
• Being a generous colleague: good reviews, helpful feedback, credit for others.
• Consistency: a clear research direction over time.

RememberKeep ORCID, Google Scholar and a simple page up to date. Treat metrics with caution; build a reputation for work others can trust.