In this section, we will discuss important elements to making your work discoverable and increasing your scholarly impact, the last stage of the research lifecycle. One major way to ensure that your impact is being tracked is by creating at least one Researcher Profile. In this section you will learn about the importance of tracking your publications and using tools to ensure those publications are linked to you.

Researcher Profiles

What’s the point of having a Researcher Profile, shouldn’t LinkedIn be enough? While LinkedIn and other types of Social Media are beneficial in displaying your academic achievements, they require a lot of active engagement. Additionally, it is easy to get lost amongst other patrons that have the same name as you. Wouldn’t it be better to have your research not only easily discoverable but undeniably connected to you? This is where Researcher Profiles come in.

When you sign-up with one (or more) of these Researcher Profiles sites you will be given a unique identifier that can be used overtime, between institutions, and across information systems to accurately track and attribute your research activities to you. Once created, the unique identifier won’t change due to name, academic status, or any other life event that may make attributing works to you difficult.

Where to begin?

There are a handful of Research Profile sites to make an account with, so which is the best? A helpful table comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of Open Research and Contributor Identifier (ORCID), Google Scholar, ResearcherID, and Scopus Author ID can be found here on the Researcher Profiles and Identifier libguide.

ORCID is quickly emerging as the industry standard and Texas State University is an ORCID Institutional Member; however, it does not cost anything to register with the majority of legitimate Researcher Profile systems. If you are interested in going with ORCID, you can sign-up here. It takes less than five minutes!

Archiving Your Work With Texas State University

As an affiliate of Texas State University, you have the ability to submit publications, presentations, posters, reports, theses and dissertations, and other works to the Research and Scholarship Repository. The repository is a professionally maintained archive that centralizes, preserves, and makes accessible the university’s intellectual and creative materials; while additionally giving the works increased visibility over time through open access. Moreover, for research involving datasets, you have access to the Texas State Data Repository (TDL). The Texas State Data Repository is ideal for meeting grant funding and publisher requirements in addition to providing a platform for publishing and sharing research datasets for data management best practices.

How does the submission process work?

The submission process for both the Texas State Data and Research and Scholarship repositories are very similar but have a few differences. Once material is submitted, a CC0 license will be applied which places the work in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purpose without restriction under copyright and database law. TDL allows submitters to edit the applied license, however, the Research and Scholarship Repository does not. Though authors are unable to change the creative commons license with the Research and Scholarship Repository, they do retain their authors rights and are free to make their work available on other websites in addition to formally publishing their work without permission from the University. It is recommend to become familiar with your rights as an author before submitting any work to the repository or publishers by reviewing the Author Rights and Publishing Agreements libguide.

If you wish to submit previously published work to the Research and Scholarship Repository, please review the agreement terms made with the publisher as you may need to seek permission in cases where rights have been surrendered. For assistance with this process, please do not hesitate to email OpenScholarship@txstate.edu.

What format should my submission be in?

Submissions must be in a digital format to be considered for the institutional repositories. A complete list of file formats can be found here: Research and Scholarship Repository: File Formats

Research Communities

As you grow in your career it is important to stay abreast of developments in your area of study. A good way to do that is to seek out and join a research community. These include scholarly communities, associations, and working groups. There are many such communities that will be specific to your area of study and, while you may already be part of some communities, it is recommended that you discuss this with your colleagues and peers. You may also find research communities by viewing researcher profiles of researchers that study similar areas as you.

Joining a research community’s listserv will help keep you updated on calls for proposals or submissions, conferences, politics in the field, invitations for collaboration, etc. Being part of a community can also help you find future collaborators or partners, as well as data, studies, and other important things for your work.

Citation Alerts

It might be beneficial for you to track article citations for your own work or the work of a scholar you are interested in. You can set up a citation alert using Google Scholar. Simply create an account using a Google email address and navigate to the “Create Alert” button on the left-side navigation menu. This will help you to know when your article is cited, or when new research directly related to a particular study is published.