Template for a "Research Footprint": An overview of a researcher's online academic presence

What do you look like as a researcher, when someone external to your institute looks you up online?

A "Research Footprint" provides a researcher with an immediate and visual overview of their online academic presence. We show what the researcher's metrics look like on the most widely used citation databases: Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar. We limit the Research Footprint to the most basic personal metrics: Number of publications, number of open access publications, number of citations, times cited per year, and the h-index. We check whether the researcher has created and maintained the most important author identifiers: ORCID, ScopusID and ResearcherID (Publons), and linked them to our institutional repository based on PURE.

We collect all this data as a kicking off point for a 1-on-1 discussion with the researcher. In that discussion we go through the importance of Author Identifiers and check whether all their publications are properly claimed on Scopus, WoS and Google Scholar. Finally, we give them the tools to maintain their profiles on their own to ensure that when external parties look them up, they find an accurate representation of the researcher's publication data.

These are the template files we developed at the University of Southern Denmark to generate the Research Footprint. They include a Disclaimer and a GDPR statement. The publication data can be collected in the provided Excel file and then copied over to the Word file.