Author Profiles
Authors are encouraged to use the same variation of their name consistently throughout their academic and research careers. This practice is integral to establishing a unique public profile for dissemination and promotion of scholarly works.
- Consistency of an author name enhances the discoverability of research.
- Uniqueness of an author name establishes a presence for an author.
See Tools for Authors for more information.
Publication Metrics
Publication metrics can be used to illuminate many stories to provide a meaningful narrative of scholarly productivity and impact. These narratives can be used for a variety of purposes such as tenure/promotion, grant applications and renewal reports, NIH Biosketches, benchmarking, and for administrative purposes such as departmental or university performance reports. Analysis of publication data can also be used to demonstrate a gap in the knowledge of a specific area of research for an application, provide justification that an investigator is the best-qualified person to undertake research in a specific area of research or to illustrate collaborative efforts among investigators.
See Quantifying the Impact of My Publications for more information.
Track Your Work: Who is Citing Your Work?
Authors are encouraged to track their scholarly work by creating alerts to databases or search engines to monitor how their works are being used and reviewing other works that cite theirs.
Reasons to track your work include:
- Learn which authors and institutions are using your work
- Determine if research findings are duplicated, confirmed, corrected, improved or repudiated
- Determine if research findings were extended (different human populations, different animal models/species, etc.
- Confirm that research findings were properly attributed and credited
- Identify similar research projects
- Identify possible collaborators
- Document research impact
- Quantify return on research investment
- Justify future requests for funding
- Tenure/Promotion
- Evaluation
See Tools for Authors for more information.
What is the Impact of Your Work?
A growing emphasis by key stakeholders to demonstrate tangible and meaningful outcomes has spurred a trend towards supplementing traditional publication measures of reporting scholarly research to illustrate the impact of research on knowledge diffusion, clinical applications, and public health outcomes.
While traditional measures based on publications (number of publications, number of citations, journal impact factor scores, etc.) can provide compelling narratives, no single metric is sufficient for measuring performance, quality, or impact by an author. Publication data is but a single chapter in an author’s academic and research story.
Advances in digital technology afford numerous avenues for authors to not only disseminate research findings but also to document the diffusion of their research. The capacity to measure and report tangible outcomes can be used for a variety of purposes and tailored for various audiences ranging from the layperson, clinicians, investigators, organizations, and funding agencies.
Other sources for reporting of scholarly research include awarded grants, honors/awards, patents, intellectual property, outreach efforts, teaching activities, professional organization efforts, journal editorship, advisory board activities, mentoring efforts, community engagement activities, to name a few. Including the full spectrum of an author’s research activities allow for a more compelling narrative of an author’s academic and research story.
See Tools for Authors and Assessing the Impact of Your Research for more information.