In today’s fast-paced world of research, time has become an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. An independent study commissioned by Ex Libris revealed that “academic researchers face a significant challenge in finding enough time to effectively manage their research activities.” According to the Ex Libris Research Advisory Council, researchers at their institutions allocate approximately 45% of their time to administrative tasks.

Another pressing issue highlighted in the study is the burden of maintaining researcher profiles. Keeping a single profile updated is challenging, but the situation becomes even more daunting when dealing with multiple platforms across the internet. The study indicates that 20% of researchers use five or more different profile platforms simultaneously, adding to their administrative load.

The paper Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science zeroes in on the detrimental effects of multiple time-consuming profile platforms:

“There is a real risk that early career researchers aiming to enhance their profile and optimize their visibility may spend more time updating their profile in multiple networking platforms than continuing to be academically productive.”

If a researcher neglects their profiles, this can lead to a cascade of potentially serious consequences. Discovery and collaboration can be jeopardized, which can undermine the reach and effectiveness of their research. For librarians and administrators, the volume and caliber of research directly contributes to the scholarly reputation of their institution.

The situation becomes a catch-22: on the one hand, maintaining researcher profiles takes valuable time away from critical research work, while inadequate profiles may impede the impact of research, posing challenges to both researchers and their affiliated institutions.

Librarians play a pivotal role in supporting researchers

Scholarly communications librarians and subject liaisons serve as key advisors to faculty, providing guidance on content, analytics and workflow tools available to ensure they are successful. This support extends to the promotion of their work without compromising valuable research time. When it comes to researcher profiles, integrated, multi-faceted and easily updated profiles are essential to amplify the reach of their work with minimal manual effort.

Addressing this need, Clarivate has created a resource that builds on the strength and integrity of the Web of Science. Web of Science Researcher Profiles provide a comprehensive 360-degree view of a researcher’s contributions, encompassing publications, preprints, peer reviews, citation metrics and journal editing work – all in one place. Through seamless integrations, automation and purposeful design, these profiles also streamline researchers’ workflows and enrich their understanding of their field and their place within it.

Read on to learn how Web of Science Researcher Profiles can save researchers time and build their effectiveness.

Unlocking visibility and contribution across platforms

Web of Science Researcher Profiles play a pivotal role in elevating researchers’ visibility within the global research community. Open and visible to everyone, these profiles showcase an individual’s publications and citations alongside publisher-verified peer reviews and editorships, helping them demonstrate a complete view of their achievements and attract potential collaborators and funders. As evaluators increasingly emphasize the real-world outcomes of basic research, Web of Science profiles help researchers highlight the innovations built upon their work, citing patent information as evidence. Researchers can also enhance their profiles with preprint and post-publication reviews, provide early career researchers an opportunity to showcase their expertise to editors while honing their manuscript analysis skills.

Researchers aspire to reach a wide audience with their rich, compelling profiles, necessitating effective management of their presence across multiple platforms. As surveys have shown, the time-intensive process of increasing visibility hinders time which could be spent on progressing basic research, leading to potential errors and omissions when rekeying data across various systems. To alleviate this challenge, Web of Science profiles integrate seamlessly with ORCID, synchronizing updates across platforms. The result is that researchers gain the visibility they need, but spend less time keying in their accomplishments and can dedicate more time to  progress new projects and impactful research.

Automation and personalization for effective profile management and networking

For librarians advising early career researchers who are establishing their profile for the first time, the Web of Science simplifies the process by offering automatically generated, disambiguated author records for all published researchers in the Web of Science Core Collection. With a little manual startup, researchers can conveniently set up their profiles and allow the Web of Science to automatically update them with new publications and preprints from the Web of Science Core Collection and the Preprint Citation Index.

Personalization options in Web of Science profiles keep those same researchers informed on their research landscape, supporting their career growth and influence. For example, they can monitor the influence of their papers through automated weekly email alerts, notifying them of new articles which cite their work. Additionally, they can stay abreast of the most relevant and impactful research in their field while also discovering emerging and established researchers working in similar areas.

Researchers often seek to collaborate with diverse co-authors to enhance their research and expand their professional networks. To address that need, Web of Science Researcher Profiles include valuable recommendations, facilitating connections between researchers beyond their known academic networks. By discovering new collaboration opportunities, researchers can uncover greater innovation opportunities, ultimately aligning with their university’s mission.

Promoting responsible research assessment

Clarivate understands that a researcher’s career cannot be properly represented by a single metric. Hence, the Web of Science Researcher Profiles go beyond time-saving automation and integration to empower researchers to showcase their influence and impact through a combination of factors including peer review data, citation metrics and compelling visualizations.

Among the visualizations are Author Impact Beamplots, which were introduced in 2021. Author Impact Beamplots enable assessors to delve deeper into a researcher’s publication portfolio. These beamplots illustrate the volume and citation impact of an individual’s publication portfolio over time, with percentiles normalized against time and subject area, to allow for better comparisons across fields. This contemporary and more accurate approach aligns with broader community efforts to reform research assessment and encourages the responsible use of metrics.

Building on the strength of the Web of Science

The Web of Science, renowned as the most trusted, publisher-independent database, has long been a valuable resource for researchers and institutions worldwide. Through Web of Science Researcher Profiles, your researchers can showcase their work on a trusted platform used by more than 15 million of their peers at more than 9,000 institutions worldwide. This visibility not only benefits researchers, but also offers a significant advantage to funders and potential collaborators who can discover the expertise​ and accomplishments of researchers at your institution. With Web of Science Researcher profiles, researchers’ profiles are surfaced throughout Web of Science data and across various platform experiences, bolstering collaboration opportunities and scholarly connections.

Want to save researchers time and help them be more effective? Let’s talk.

The post Solving time crunch and profile challenges for researchers appeared first on Clarivate.

We have created the next generation of the Web of Science Researcher Profiles by incorporating the best features of Publons and ResearcherID. When Publons integrated with the Web of Science and ResearcherID in 2019, we received many requests from users asking us to improve the way the tools work together. Community feedback has guided our development since day one.

With new Web of Science Researcher Profiles, you can:​

• ​Receive credit for all of your scholarly contributions ​
  Track your publications, citation metrics, peer reviews and journal editing work in one place to demonstrate your expertise throughout your career.​
• Be noticed by funders and potential collaborators​
  Showcase your work in a trusted database used by over 15 million researchers at more than 9,000 institutions worldwide.​
• Keep track of when your work is cited ​
  You’ll receive automatic citation alerts for the publications in your profile that are indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.
• See the full picture of your citation impact in context​
  Web of Science Researcher Profiles help you gain a deeper understanding of the citation impact of your work with a visualization (Web of Science Author Impact Beamplot) that aligns with best practices for research evaluation.
• Get back to what matters most
  Save time with a profile that syncs with ORCID and exports your publications and verified peer review history with a few clicks, so that you can focus on your research.​
• Stand out from the crowd
  With badges for your earned designations including Highly Cited Researchers and Web of Science Academy Mentor or Graduate. You can also hide your old name to become discoverable by your chosen name.

Your new profile is waiting for you – access it today

To access your Web of Science Researcher Profile simply log in to webofscience.com with your existing user credentials to view, manage, and search across researcher profiles, and continue to gain recognition for your publications, peer reviews, and editorial work.

Your username and password will be the same, and you will have free access to this resource on Web of Science from August 18.

If you would like to link to your new Web of Science profile – for example, from your institution’s website, then the new URL will be https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/[insert your ResearcherID]. In the meantime, the URL for your Publons profile will simply redirect to your new Web of Science profile.

Log in to your Web of Science Researcher Profile

Learn more about the Web of Science here

Visit the interactive guide to your new profile here

The post The next generation of Web of Science Researcher Profiles appeared first on Clarivate.

The increasingly global approach to research presents unique challenges. Researchers must establish a research identity for their contribution to their field to be recognized – all while competing for funding and positions and establishing valuable collaborative relationships.  The Web of Science Group has designed the latest Web of Science release – a new Author Search, Author Record and curation mechanism – to meet these challenges faced by the research community.

A key challenge in establishing researchers’ author identities is name disambiguation across the journals, indexes, and other tools and systems that represent publications. Names are inherently ambiguous; researchers may have a common name shared by hundreds of other people, or their names may have changed over the course of their career. Also, publisher and indexer policies may impose standards on name presentation that lead to different versions of researchers’ names in the published record.

This issue also presents challenges for research administrators and funders, who need to understand the output and impact of their researchers and research teams in order to measure their investment in research initiatives and programs, remain competitive and meet their strategic goals. Within the extended research, publication and funding ecosystem, solving problems around researcher identity will help to improve research efficiency and provide legitimacy to reward and incentive structures.

“Within the extended research, publication and funding ecosystem, solving problems around researcher identity will help to improve research efficiency and provide legitimacy to reward and incentive structures.”

The process of author disambiguation aims to find all publications belonging to a given author and distinguish them from publications of other authors who share the same name. The Web of Science Group has prioritized challenges in establishing and managing researcher identity with our products and services for many years.

• In 2007, the Web of Science Group (then Thomson Scientific) established the ResearcherID framework in order to let researchers begin to take control of their identity in the Web of Science data.
• In 2012, we recognized the need for a global effort to address this problem and became a founding member of ORCID.
• In 2017, we acquired Publons, which has become the world’s most comprehensive researcher profile database, showcasing researchers’ full impact across their career, including peer review, publication and citation records, editorial affiliations and contributions, and more.

Today, the Web of Science data ecosystem is closely aligned with both ORCID (via daily feeds of metadata) and Web of Science ResearcherID (now managed by Publons) in order to improve author discovery and drive author name disambiguation for the millions of researchers indexed in Web of Science Core Collection. However, relying on ORCID and Publons only addresses one avenue of feedback on identity and authorship, one that recognizes authors voluntarily claiming their work.

To supplement this work, we’ve developed powerful machine learning algorithms to disambiguate researcher names when there isn’t an external source of feedback. These two avenues of feedback – human curation and powerful algorithms – have helped to establish Web of Science content as a premier source of data for researchers and institutions to make decisions that impact their careers and determine the course of science.

In the latest Web of Science release, we have taken additional steps to improve the depth of research identity. We have introduced an integrated, collaborative approach to help you discover researchers and provide disambiguation feedback. In doing so, we hope to:

1. Make it easier to find papers authored by the researchers that matter to you.
2. Empower Web of Science users to submit feedback to curate an author’s publication record in the Web of Science Core Collection.

The Web of Science Group has introduced new features to support the research community:

• Author Search (Beta): A newly enhanced Author Search intuitively guides you to ‘Author Records’ that provide a set of publications likely authored by a single person. This new search will help you easily find your researchers and their publications in Web of Science Core Collection – regardless of how common or complex their name, or how their name may be presented in different publications over time.
• New Author Record (Beta): A new ‘Author Record’ provides an initial snapshot of an author’s publications and citation impact in Web of Science Core Collection, and shows alternative names and organization affiliations so you can see how a researcher is reflected in our data over time. Author Records are based on the intersection of a machine learning algorithm, operating on the rich Web of Science metadata and unique citation network, and human curation via Publons and ORCID. They represent a group of publications that are likely the output of a single person, even when a researcher name is common or presented in different versions in the published record.
• Author Data is now in your control – Because no algorithm is perfect, your feedback matters. While Author Records provide an initial snapshot of authors’ publications in Web of Science Core Collection, your feedback can help fine-tune author identity. When examining an Author Record, any Web of Science user can submit feedback to help further refine any Author Record created by our algorithm.
• Researchers can claim their Author Record – Authors can now claim ownership of their Author Records and manage their Web of Science identities via Publons, creating their unique Web of Science ResearcherID. Publons provides a 360-degree view of researchers’ activity – giving them a single profile to manage their identities, and the changes researchers makes to their publication record in Publons will seamlessly update their publication records in Web of Science Core Collection and ORCID.

Watch now to see these features in action

The Web of Science Group continues its commitment to recognizing authorship and providing accurate author data. For more than 50 years, Web of Science Core Collection has indexed every author from every journal we index, along with every cited reference from every article. The consistent structure of our author data and our pioneering work around author identity have laid a solid foundation for further steps in addressing the problems around author identity – helping us to support easy discovery of an author’s published work and assure confident assessment of researcher output and associated citation impact.  This latest effort aligns with our goal of improving research efficiency to speed the course of scientific discovery and innovation.

We are all trying to get to better data. Let’s get there together.

Try for yourself:

• Author Search in Web of Science
• Create a Publons Profile and claim and curate your Web of Science Core Collection publications
• Download our Quick Reference Guide
• Watch Training Videos

The post Author data, made better together appeared first on Clarivate.