An author profile can provide a concise summary of the body of work of a scholar. Usually an author profile is associated with an author identifier, of which several are explained below. Author profiles generally provide lists of a scholar's peer-reviewed publications, but could also include other publications, data, presentations, etc. In addition, an author profile can provide metrics that can be an indicator of scholarly influence, impact, and prestige.
ORCID is an open-source author identifier that is interoperable between most scholarly metrics sources, such as Web of Science, Dimensions, and altmetrics sources. ORCID's main strength is in its ability to coordinate and interoperate with many other external author profile systems and identifiers, such as bibliographic databases, grant funders, publishers, and so forth.
Publons is a robust author profiling tool that is integrated with both ORCID and Web of Science. It allows a scholar to display information about scholarly activities including publications and impact metrics, and validates credit for being a peer reviewer. While this is a part of the Web of Science suite of services, setting up a Publons profile is free to anyone.
Google Scholar Citations provides the user with the ability to pull his or her publication information from the web (via Google Scholar) and track citing references. Citing references tend to be more international in scope and can include more conference papers, government reports, and non-peer-reviewed sources than Web of Science. Scholars should keep in mind that the quantity of citing references may not always equal quality, and therefore the citing reference counts and other metrics available in Google Scholar profiles should be subject to additional scrutiny and evaluation. The researcher will need to create a Google Account in order to set up a Citations profile.
