SUPPORTING ADAPTIVE GROWTH

UAF is a Land, Sea, and Space Grant Institution

UAF ranks in the top 150 of nearly 700 US institutions that conduct research. We’ve been listed in the top 11 of more than 10,000 institutions worldwide for number of citations in climate change publications and fourth among US universities. Your research and scholarly activity matters.

Deans, Chairs, & Directors

Do you have a group of faculty who would like to collectively work towards establishing a better online presence? Contact Madara Mason (emason@alaska.edu) to set up a half-day workshop.

Repositories, Networks, and Your Digital Identity

As contemporary researchers, scholars, and creatives, curating an online presence shows students and peers that you recognize and participate in the dissemination of scholarship as a common good.

Don’t conflate the numerical metrics of the Journal Impact Factor, h-index, or Plum metrics (all algorithmic means of distilling publication data into a single number) with the value of having an open, accessible online identity connected to high-quality scholarly output and your institutional affiliation. They are correlates, but not interchangeable.

Google Scholar

Adding and maintaining your profile on Google Scholar isn’t difficult. Newly published work can be automatically added to the Scholar database.

Pro Tip

Identify UAF as your home institution in any relevant fields in your profile for any and all of these sites. This improves our institutional rankings due to publication counts and the international collaboration tracking.

Pro Tip

Discuss with your mentor, department chair, or dean the criteria for research, scholarly, and creative activity supported within your unit. The value of scholarly output varies widely across disciplines.

Academia.edu

Academia is largely a repository, but the networking and newsfeed aspect of the service is helpful. It’s easy to find other UAF researchers and follow their publications you can simply follow topics to stay on top of current research. An analytics tool can help you see how often others are engaging with your work.

Create an account.

Research Gate

ResearchGate is a professional network for scientists. You can request access to publications straight from the author, which may prove helpful when tracking down the original publication is difficult.

LinkedIn can be a valuable place to broadcast publications, especially to other researchers and academics who may be looking for a new home. Members of the press sometimes use LinkedIn as a way to find new research to write about and non-academics can easily find and share your work through this channel.

Social Science Research Network

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Elsevier

Elsevier offers a number of tools for researchers and authors. A Scopus ID is often required by federal funding agencies. Some tools are cross-discipline and some are discipline-specific. Some of the tools are proprietary and have a cost associated with them.

Elsevier’s entire suite of tools
Scopus (via Rasmuson)
Mendeley
Science Direct (paid for by Rasmuson library)

ScholarWorks@UA

This is the primary repository for publications within the University of Alaska. Make sure you submit all of your work here. It only takes a few minutes and your work will be fed into multiple databases, including Google Scholar.

Pro Tip

Make your profile public and use a clear photo of yourself. A carefully crafted online identity can help establish trust and authority in your field and may help peers find you more easily at conferences.

Rasmuson Subscriptions

Be sure to look at the list of Rasmuson supported databases and networks before you use a pay-to-play service. Rasmuson sometimes makes changes to subscriptions and purchases, so check in to see what is available to you and what is slated to disappear.

ORCiD

This researcher ID system is required more and more often by funding agencies. “ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and…supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.”

Agency-Specific Repositories and Networks

Pro Tip

Aligning with agency-sponsored repositories is both cost effective and consistent!

PubSpace

A gateway to peer-reviewed papers from NASA-funded research. “Beginning with research funded in 2016, all NASA-funded authors and co-authors (both civil servant and non-civil servant) have an Agency requirement to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated data into NIH’s NASA publication repository.”

NSF’s Arctic Data Center

This is a repository specifically for NSF funded research on the Arctic. “The Arctic Data Center is the primary repository for the Arctic Section of the Office of Polar Programs. Our mission is to help the research community reproducibly preserve and discover all products of NSF-funded science in the Arctic, including data, metadata, software, and documents. In this video, you’ll learn how to navigate the catalog, and how to explore different fields in the metadata records.”

NIH Repositories

“To help researchers locate an appropriate resource for sharing their data, as well as to promote awareness of resources where datasets can be located for reuse, BMIC maintains lists of several types of data sharing resources:

Open NIH-supported domain-specific repositories that house data of a specific type or related to a specific discipline;
Other NIH-supported domain-specific resources, including repositories and knowledgebases, that have limitations on submitting and/or accessing data; and
Generalist repositories that house data regardless of type, format, content, or subject matter.”

Resources on Bibliometrics and Evaluating Research

Ten Principles to Guide Research Evaluation

Quantitative evaluation should support qualitative, expert assessment.
Measure performance against the research missions of the institution, group or researcher.
Protect excellence in locally relevant research.
Keep data collection and analytical processes open, transparent and simple.
Allow those evaluated to verify data and analysis.
Account for variation by field in publication and citation practices.
Base assessment of individual researchers on a qualitative judgement of their portfolio.
Avoid misplaced concreteness and false precision.
Recognize the systemic effects of assessment and indicators.
Scrutinize indicators regularly and update them.

–Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

More than 1200 institutions and 14,000 individuals have signed the DORA declaration, which, among other things, reccommends that entities and individuals “not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.”

Pro Tip

Budget for publication open access fees in your grant proposals!