Managing your researcher profile in the modern age

I have between 16 and 24 publications in various databases and keeping track of these can be more difficult than I think it should be. I've always used PubMed as my primary search tool and have a link to publications by James Hadfield on my blog. However like most of you I have a name that is not so unique, and other James Hadfield's also pop up in my search results (see the end of this post, and feel free to comment if you're another James Hadfield).

I posted previously about the best way to link to a paper and I'm still suggesting the DOI is the thing to use. It can be found by search engines and aggregators making the collection of commentary a little easier. In the same post I also suggested that a unique identifier for an individual would be a big step forward. Well that was also made available recently and in several different forms, so my new quesiton is which ID should you be using?

Who's looking at my papers (or yours): Before I get onto unique researcher IDs I wanted to come back to the issue of how DOI's and other tools allow aggregators to capture content. The newest "killer-app" for me is Altmetric.

They track how papers are viewed and mentioned; in the news, on blogs, on Twitter, etc. The thing you'll probably be adding to you bookmark immediately after reading this post is their free bookmarklet which will give you a report on any paper you happen to be looking at online. Below is an image of the report for one of the recent papers I was involved with. I'd like to see citations tracked and I'm sure we'll see lots more development from the team!

Altmetric

Which profile managing system to use: There are 5 systems you might use and it is hard to say you can easily choose one. However in writing this post I tried to get all 5 up-to-date. Some talk to each other, which helps - but you can't get away from the fact that no-one has time to waste. I'll probably stick with keeping ORCID and GoogleScholar up-to-dte and then link my ORCID ID to my Scopus and ResearcherID accounts.

ORCID: My ORCID ID 0000-0001-9868-4989. The open access one! Started in 2010 ORCID is "an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers". The registry gives unique IDS to any registered scientists with data being open access. Organisations can also sign up to allow management of staff research outputs. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

Google Scholar: Me. Good listing of citations. Good presentation of citation metrics. Want to know how Google Scholar works, then read this.

Scopus:  My Scopus Author ID: 26662876800. Display of citation numbers and link to citations page. Links to web pages mentioning your work and patents referencing it.

ResearcherID: My ResearcherID: A-1874-2013. ResearcherID is a product from Thomson Reuters and provides a solution to the author ambiguity by assigning a unique identifier to researchers. Only articles from Web of Science with citation data are included in the citation calculations. Good presentation of citation metrics.

ResearchGate: Me. Good presentation of citation metrics. Founded by 2 doctors and a computer scientist, Research Gate has been billed as "social networking for scientists". 

Why bother? Given all this information is correctly assigned the the correct authors, at the correct institution and the correct funders then we should be able to get into some very interesting meta-analysis.

Who's collaborative and who's not? Do some institutions or grant funders punch above their weight? If so why, is there something cultural that can be translated to others? Does the journal you publish in impact the coverage your work gets over time? Many other questions can also be asked, although some may not want to see the answers!

My papers in a little bit more detail: Each has a link to its DOI, PbMed and Altmetric stats.

Mohammad Murtaza et al, Non-invasive analysis of acquired resistance to cancer therapy by sequencing of plasma DNA, in Nature 2013 May 2;497(7447):108-12. PMID:23563269 with 8 citations* at the time of writing. Altmetric stats.

Saad Idris et al, The role of high-throughput technologies in clinical cancer genomics, in Expert Rev Mol Diagn. 2013 Mar;13(2):167-81. PMID:23477557 with 2 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Tim Forshew et al, Noninvasive identification and monitoring of cancer mutations by targeted deep sequencing of plasma DNA, in Sci Transl Med. 2012 May 30;4(136):136ra68. PMID:22649089 with 31 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Christina Curtis et al: The genomic and transcriptomic architecture of 2,000 breast tumours reveals novel subgroups, in Nature 486 (7403), 346-352. PMID with 229 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Kelly Holmes et al, Transducin-like enhancer protein 1 mediates estrogen receptor binding and transcriptional activity in breast cancer cells, in Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Feb 21;109(8):2748-53. PMID:21536917 with 15 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Sarah Aldridge & James Hadfield, Introduction to miRNA profiling technologies and cross-platform comparison, in Methods Mol Biol. 2012;822:19-31. PMID:22144189 with 5 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Charlie Massie et al: The androgen receptor fuels prostate cancer by regulating central metabolism and biosynthesis, in EMBO J. 2011 May 20;30(13):2719-33. PMID:21602788 with 56 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Andy Lynch et al: The cost of reducing starting RNA quantity for Illumina BeadArrays: a bead-level dilution experiment, in BMC Genomics. 2010 Oct 6;11:540. PMID:20925945 with 2 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Anna Git et al: Systematic comparison of microarray profiling, real-time PCR, and next-generation sequencing technologies for measuring differential microRNA expression, in RNA. 2010 May;16(5):991-1006. PMID:20360395 with 132 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Christina Curtis et al: The pitfalls of platform comparison: DNA copy number array technologies assessed, in BMC Genomics. 2009 Dec 8;10:588. PMID:19995423 with 57 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Dominic Schmidt et al: ChIP-seq: using high-throughput sequencing to discover protein-DNA interactions, in Methods. 2009 Jul;48(3):240-8. PMID:19275939 with citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Partha Das et al: Piwi and piRNAs act upstream of an endogenous siRNA pathway to suppress Tc3 transposon mobility in the Caenorhabditis elegans germline, in Molecular cell 31 (1), 79-90. PMID:18571451with 131 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Phil Smith et al: STS markers for the wheat yellow rust resistance gene Yr5 suggest a NBS-LRR-type resistance gene cluster, in Genome 2007 Mar;50(3):259-65. PMID:17502899 with 7 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Steve Marquadt et al: Additional targets of the Arabidopsis autonomous pathway members, FCA and FY, in J Exp Bot. 2006;57(13):3379-86. PMID:16940039 with X 34 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Raka Mitra et al: A Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase required for symbiotic nodule development: Gene identification by transcript-based cloning, in PNAS 2004 Mar 30;101(13):4701-5. PMID:15070781 with 289 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Robert Koebner and James Hadfield: Large-scale mutagenesis directed at specific chromosomes in wheat, in Genome. 2001 Feb;44(1):45-9. PMID:11269355 with 2 citations* at the time or writing. Altmetric stats.

Barbara Jennings et al, A differential PCR assay for the detection of c-erbB 2 amplification used in a prospective study of breast cancer, in Mol Pathol. 1997 Oct;50(5):254-6. PMID:9497915 with 14 citations* at the time of writing. Altmetric stats.

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There is a J Hadfield working on plants in Australia (here, here, here, here, here &; here), at least one other J Hadfield working in clinical sciences (here & here), and possibly one other in basic research (here).


(*according to Google Scholar)