Author Profiles Guide

Why Create and Maintain an Author Profile?

Your name is foundational to being discovered and recognized: it establishes your unique professional profile, which stays with you throughout your research and academic career. However, author ambiguity can and does occur if one or more of the following statements is true:

• You have changed your name.
• Your name is similar or identical to others.
• You have been affiliated with several organizations over your career.

Therefore, multiple name variants may be associated with your publications and scholarly activities, and these name variants can be a key concern when calculating author level metrics.

It is beneficial to your professional image to be proactive in managing your profile. Your researcher profile functions as a persistent identifier and follows you throughout your career. This unique identifier links your scholarly activities, including publications, presentations, editorial or peer review, and other research contributions.

Benefits include:

• Differentiates you from other researchers with identical or similar names
• Attributes your scholarly activities to you and takes into account name changes and/or other institutional affiliations
• Increases the visibility of your scholarly activities to grant funders and potential collaborators
• Improves accuracy of author level metrics
• Streamlines keeping track of scholarly activities (if regularly maintained)

Note: The term “author” can be interchanged with researcher, academic, scholar, or equivalent.