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Scholarly Communications & Open Access

Increase your Scholarly Impact

Build a public profile

You have spent time and effort to pursue and publish your research, but how can you help others find and access it? How can you know who is using your work, and how? This guide offers some ideas about how to understand and increase your scholarly impact.

Manage your Public Profile

Create a scholarly identity with tools that help you (and others) track your research outputs. A good place to start is an ORCID iD and/or a Google Scholar Profile.

ORCID iD

ORCID iD green and white iconORCID (Open Research and Contributor ID) is a globally recognized non-profit organization that provides a registry of free and persistent digital ID numbers (called "ORCID iDs") that connects you to your legitimate research output. You can register for an ORCID iD, which you then own. You can control the visibility of your details (see examples below).

Grantmaking institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) require applicants to have ORCID numbers, and some journals offer services to link publications to the author's ORCID iD. 

Many SUNY Oneonta colleagues use ORCID identifiers. Here is an example of an ORCID registry page:

Darren Chase, Library Director: ORCID iD icon in green and white https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4144-3222 

Google Scholar profile

Google scholar logoYou can register a profile in Google Scholar that links to any of your articles indexed via Google, and provides getting alerts about new citations. To sign up, go to Google Scholar while signed into your Google account and click on "My Profile" at the top left to build a profile.

Make sure to select the option "Don't automatically update my profile. Send me an email to review and confirm updates" to prevent your profile being linked with citations from authors with similar names to yours. 

Share with Open Access

Submit Published Articles to SOAR

The SUNY Open Access Repository (SOAR) offers all published SUNY authors a way to share a version of their otherwise paywalled (restricted) articles. Details and forms for submitting to SOAR is found on the SOAR page of this guide. 

Track the reach of your scholarship

Track your Scholarly Reach

How many times have your articles been cited, tweeted, or mentioned? Online tools can help you track the reach of your scholarly outputs. 

  • Bibliometrics are quantitative citation-counting measures such as journal impact factors and h-indices. 
  • Altmetrics capture mentions about articles on social media, in the news, and in online reference managers like Zotero and Mendeley. 

All of these tools should be used responsibly. They measure citations and mentions, but none of them can tell you if the mentions are positive or negative or the content of the scholarship is high quality. Critics of bibliometrics note that no measurement tool works for every discipline or evaluation need, and all measuring methods should be described transparently before they are applied. Some measures, like the H-index, are biased toward later-career scholars. 

Bibliometric tools: the h-index

The h-index is used to calculate either an author’s OR a publication’s influence based on the number of times their articles have been cited. 

H-Index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h

An author that has published at least 25 articles that have been cited at least 25 times each would have an h-index of 25, for example. 

Since it is widely applied, it is a good idea to know your h-index as an author. However, it is not a good metric for early-career scholars, it only measures citations (not quality of content), and it should be used within a wider discussion of a scholar’s impact. The Conversation.com has a good Explainer article that discusses the history of the h-index as well as some pros and cons of the metric.

Find (and, if necessary, update) your h-index at Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science’s Publons service.

  • Google Scholar – create a Scholar profile (see "Build a Profile" above) and populate it with your publications. Your h-index will appear on the right-side of your profile page.
  • Web of Science - SUNY Oneonta does not have a Web of Science subscription, but you can still register for free to create a Publons account. Once you have created your Publons account, your h-index will appear in your dashboard
  • Scopus – Scopus is a public citation database owned by Elsevier that automatically generates a Scopus Author ID when an author’s first publication is indexed. You can ensure your profile is accurate by signing in (again for free) and using the Scopus Author Feedback Wizard. Note: Your h-index is publicly available through Scopus whether you register and update your account or not -- see what is there by searching your name at Scopus. 

Altmetrics tools

The most well-known altmetrics tools are usually applied to individual journal articles to measure social reach, including social media mentions (tweets or posts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more), saves in citation management programs like Mendeley, and attention from news media or blogs. You will find them on journal websites, institutional repositories, and databases. Here are a few of the most recognizable: