Technology for researchers

Day 2: Tools – ORCID, Mendeley, Kudos

Welcome back!

Yesterday we considered the benefits of establishing your online researcher identity and some of the factors to think about when selecting best-fit tools for you. Today, we’ll have a brief look at three suggested tools, along with further resources to read, watch and consider.

ORCID

ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open, and not-for-profit registry of unique researcher identifiers. It is a hub that connects researchers and research outputs. An ORCID iD is an Open Researcher and Contributer ID, a persistent digital identifier able to be integrated with key research workflows and systems, such as manuscript and grant submissions. Sign up for an ORCiD in 30 seconds or watch this video to find out more:

Benefits

You can promote yourself by adding your ORCiD to your resume, thesis, web page, email signature and your public profiles – see below for an example.

Mendeley

Mendeley Research Network is an academic social network that can help you collaborate with others online and discover the latest research. Register for a free researcher profile. Create your list of publications and follow curated bibliographies shared by others in your field.

This video demonstrates how to set up your profile. (NB: the interface has been updated; use this step-by-step guide for the current interface).

Benefits

  • Works with Mendeley Reference Manager
  • Recommended papers are based on your reads, your Mendeley library and your topics
  • Join or create interest groups
  • Track who is reading your work
  • Researcher insights via the Mendeley blog

Here’s an example of a researcher profile:

 

Kudos

Kudos is more like a researcher’s toolkit rather than a networking site or a publications listing. Kudos enables you to explain your work in everyday terms (plain English), share your work via a range of communication channels, and track metrics around who is reading and citing your work. The following video explains the three easy steps to using Kudos. Registration is free.

Benefits:

  • Multiple metrics help you determine which activities and channels are most effective for communicating about your work
  • ‘Profiles’ for your publications – including lay summaries, impact statements and supplementary content – which are more engaging for a digital readership
  • Combination of functionalities offered by other platforms, all in the one tool.




 

 

 

 

Learning Activity 3: Connections

Let’s get hands-on!

One of the brilliant aspects of this imperfect digital world (we’ll talk about that in Day 3), is the simplicity of making connections between many of these researcher profile tools.

  1. Select one of the options below. There’s no one size fit’s all and these are just suggestions. You might have a better idea!

Need inspiration? Take a look at Digital identity health check for academics for some further practical suggestions.

  1. Share your experience of this activity
  • Tell us about the tools, your challenges or quick wins, or ask questions of this group.
  • For more practiced participants, share your top tips. It’s your time to shine!

Respond to at least one other participant’s post by saying what you learned from their experience.

Resources and Further Reading

ORCIDorg. “ORCID Feature: default privacy”. YouTube, 18 Jan. 2013. https://youtu.be/U9lSXSja51g

Meadows, Alice. “Six Things to Do Now You’ve Got an ORCID iD.” 2015

Perkel, Jeffrey. “‘Kudos’ Promises to Help Scientists Promote Their Papers to New Audiences: Increasingly Popular Social-Media Tool Says It Can Maximize Reach and Impact of Research.” Nature.536: 113–14.

Rapple, Charlie. “Kudos Where It’s Due: An Interview with Charlie Rapple.” Discover the Future of Research 2013.

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53 thoughts on “Day 2: Tools – ORCID, Mendeley, Kudos

  1. Morning everyone and welcome back for Day 2!

    We really enjoyed the conversations around the talking points for yesterday’s activities. Thanks to everyone who generously shared their thoughts.

    Before we dive into today, I thought I’d briefly summarise some of the points raised yesterday.

    *Bernie started us off by indicating that it’s a challenge to know which online platform (tools) are a best-fit. This was echoed by a number of participants including Anne & Tom. On the flip side, Anne and Alice identified that ORCiD and ANU Researcher pages are core for their profiles.

    *Time required – the investment of time in setting up and maintaining profiles – and the effectiveness in collaboration was raised in most comments. Concerns around the time-drain is something we can all agree on. However, Catherine mentioned the value of the “virtuous cycle” and building of proficiency over time to get the most out of an investment in an online persona.

    *Of particular interest was the fact that there is no one size fits all – different disciplines, stages of career, disciplines, personal preferences, exposure to positives and challenges in the digital space – mean that we approach this idea of building our online researcher identity in a manner as individual as each of us are.
    And thank goodness for that!

    A reminder that Candida, Elke and myself are here throughout the day.

    Now, over to y’all for Day 2.

  2. Good Morning Everyone

    It was great to see everyone yesterday tackling the vexed question of managing your online research profile and looking forward to today’s discussions.

  3. Hi all. I already have an ORCID, as well as LOOP and ResearchGate. I remember when I set up the LOOP profile (which I was asked to do by a journal that I’m an editor for), that I was able to easily import my publications across from ORCID, which was cool. I think I recall that LOOP had searched automatically for them, but had missed a few, so this was a quick and easy way to complete the list without manual intervention.
    I haven’t been that great at uploading other information (grants, professional experience etc.,), which I must get around to some time!

    1. Hello Angela

      So pleased to hear that the LOOP – ORCiD integration worked for you so well. As it is a new system some of its functionality is not as developed as we would like, but will only improve as more publishing and funder systems adopt it.

    2. Hi Angela,
      It’s good to hear that you had a positive experience with the importing of your publications from ORCID to LOOP. Hopefully this course has spurred you on to add in the other information too.

        1. I too have had a positive experince, today, with linking ORCID to my Mendeley profile. Suddenly 24 publications are sitting there in my Mendeley profile! On my to-do list thogh is to figure out why that list of publications hasnt updated since I crated the ORCID – must be a manual thing and I probably need to add them into ORCID and then they’ll scoot cross into Mendeley.

          1. That’s great. Very gratifying.
            Yes, that’s a good question. Have you instigated the import of newer publications from elsewhere 9(Scopus, Web of Science) into your ORCID profile?

  4. Good morning,
    I have a few questions:
    Q1: Is there a simpler way to import publication list rather than manually type them one by one? I forgot my password…and had to recreate a new one…
    Q2: how do these tools tackle Chinese names? There are so many Wei Du…..
    Many thanks!

    1. Hello Wei

      Y1) es there are definitely automated options to import your publications in to ORCID. We have developed a Libguide which lists a few options – http://libguides.anu.edu.au/c.php?g=692079&p=5005351

      2) If you already have other identifiers such as a Scopus or Researcher ID then some of the differentiation will already occur automatically as you link your ORCID to these. If you don’t have one or more of these iDs or they are not attached to your publications you will, in the first instance have to ‘claim’ your publications and add them to your profile manually. Having done that however, you shouldn’t have to ever do it again for your previous publications, and goiung forward as you addd your ORCID to your new publications they will be automatically attributed to you.

      1. Hmmm I’ve not immediately sure how I can get Scopus to find my post 2015 papers to add to ORCID. I just added one by hand and am thinking that unless there’s a slick way to do this, once school is finished I might get my teenage daughter to enter the rest for a small fee – she did most of my RGMS profile last year!

        1. Hi Alice,
          I’m hoping Elke can give you a pointer here.

          Don’t you love having savvy teens in the hours for all kinds of tasks like this 🙂 great to hear your daughter is such an asset.

        2. Hi Alice
          I have checked and it looks like you have 2 (possibly more) profiles on Scopus. While your daughter may not like me for puttung her out of work, I suggest you look at merging these to see if that gives you more publications feeding to ORCID, in the first instance. Give me a call if you would like me to step uou through the process, although it is a faitlry easy process.

          It might be worthwhile for everyone else to check their author profile in Scopus too – https://www.scopus.com/freelookup/form/author.uri to see if they have more than one.

  5. Hi everyone, sharing my experience of today’s learning activity.

    I added my ORCID to my Mendeley profile. A simple activity but taster of how things work.

    1. Logged into Mendeley (same password as other Elsevier products such as Scopus and my Mendeley reference library)
    2. Clicked on my name alongside my profile picture
    3. Selected Add or create ORCID iD under Add other IDs
    4. When redirected, logged in to ORCID.
    5. Complete – that simple

    And…the information about my role here at ANU automatically transferred across to Mendeley. This part of my profile had been blank before.

    Now to get some conference papers and abstracts in!

    1. Hi Imogen,
      thank you for this post! I couldn’t work out how to connect my Mendeley and ORCiD accounts – looks like I was going about it the wrong way (ORCiD to M instead of the reverse!) I’ll have a go following what you’ve set out here….once I’ve overcome the challenge of dusting off my Mendeley account!! 😉 I also have SCOPUS on my ORCiD account but I think that must have been set up in the ORCiD workshop (I didn’t manage that on my own!)

    2. Wow! The Mendeley site is much slicker than I remember it!! I think I’m all connected there, thanks Imogen!! I was able to do it all much more quickly than I’d expected!! (The updating might take a moment or two though!!)

      1. Hi Anne,
        Yes, Mendeley’s certainly been beefed up hasn’t it! I’m glad the steps helped and that you found it a smooth process.

  6. I already have ORCiD, ResearchGate, Academia.com, Twitter, and Google Scholar (which I had forgotten about). My main concern is about maintaining multiple accounts. However, I am willing to try different avenues. In my experience, I have had very little engagement with Academia.com and a lot of success with ResearchGate. Twitter has also been very successful for me. I also hear that LinkedIn is the next big thing with its newsfeed. The LinkedIn newsfeed is not something that I have engaged with but I will now try to be a lot more active on this site. I had forgotten about my Google Scholar account and this needed updating so that’s four platforms I will actively maintain and engage.

    I tried the ‘digital identity health check’ … a simple search of my name came up with eight accurate hits in the top 10 results. This included my current ANU research page as well as my previous university pages, my LinkedIn page, and my Twitter account. My ResearchGate page came in at number 17 and my Academia.com page did not display on the front results page. Overall, I think this is quite successful considering my name is quite common.

    1. Hmm I tried the identity health check and only came up with 4 of the top 8 belonging to me – I only recently changed institutions, and there’s two Alice Richardsons at ANU, so I think I have some work to do. Will return to this tomorrow to see how things are getting on.

    2. Hi Kellie,

      Working backwards…results of the digital health check sound, well, healthy! Another check you could do would be to evaluate your visibility against the Bronze, Silver and Gold ranking put out by QUT on the researcher profile guide to see if there were enhancements that you would consider worthwhile. eg if not investigated yet, adding your publications to ANU Open Research….?

      I haven’t check out the LinkedIn newsfeed – that’s now on my to-do list 🙂

  7. Thanks for another great module today Imogen and Candida and hello Elke! I had a post written but it got swallowed up with a ‘captcha code’ error!! Nothing like ‘forced editing’! Today’s material was again really helpful! I set up a KUDOS account and linked it to my ORCiD account. However, I haven’t been maintaining the latter account so I’ll have to bring that up to date. I can feel myself still a bit at the edge of my comfort zone with this but nothing that a bit of time and focus won’t address. I’m impressed by the possibilities of the different platforms and I can see how, used effectively, they can really help improve a person’s reach and potentially, the impact of their work. My reservation is that, with too much attention on the ‘metrics’, using these tools can become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Reflecting on Wei’s comments yesterday, I think I begin from an ‘offline’ context: I work out how I would present myself to colleagues and scholars in my field as an integrated academic (ie researcher, teacher and administrator). Once I was clear about who I am in that context, I would work out how to best transfer that online. Today’s material on the ‘online identity health check’ will be particularly helpful in doing that. (I’m in the middle of end of semester marking at present and a bit too distracted. I’m saving that for the end of the month when I have a clearer head! I also found today’s material helpful in developing a clearer idea of the different purposes of the various platforms. I have a long-neglected Mendeley account which I’ve decided to revive. However, it’s been so long, I’m not sure whether I’ll remember why I set it up the way I did! Something for a quite afternoon and a strong cup of coffee I think!!

    1. So much useful information today – thanks everyone! Reading through the postings it looks like we’ve all been busy applying and trying-out today’s content/insights. As mentioned yesterday, I’d earlier established my online profile in a few places but had not given much attention to, or been active on, any one of them. Well, that has now changed! Like Wei, Anne, Alice and Kelly also indicate, today’s posting has been really motivating, and for me it’s my ORCiD site that has received some long, overdue attention. It’s been great to have been ‘walked-through’ the processes of doing these things today. I actually got a bit of a thrill when my Scopus data transferred to my ORCiD on cue, and I felt proud of my efforts when my ORCiD QR code showed up on the QR reader on my phone!!

      But I did run into some things that didn’t work so well for me and I’m hoping someone might have some helpful advice, please?
      i) I copied and pasted the link to my ORCiD number [as advised on ORCiD] to enter into my email signature block but after repeated attempts I cannot get it to transfer into the icon and id number – it simply remains as the full code/text and not as the ORCiD ‘Preview’ indicates it will transform into. Any suggestions on how I might get it to appear as the ‘Preview’ and not the full text?
      ii) Also, I’ve entered my ANU Open Research Repository url for my thesis into my ORCiD entry for my PhD but is rather limited in how it can be displayed. For instance, neither the ‘Work Category’ or ‘Work type’ boxes allow for a PhD thesis to be entered, resulting in the ORCiD profile showing this work as simple ‘Other’. Can that be amended so that I can identify it as a PhD thesis? And is it possible for the ANU Open Research Repository to have a direct link [for instance, within the ‘Exporting’ link options] to ORCiD? Although I have entered the information manually, it would be a useful link.

      1. Hi Catherine, thank you for your encouraging feedback – much appreciated – esp that today’s post has been a good use of your time. I love that motivation has been stirred in each of us to review/revisit/refresh and investigate further in this space.

        And thank you for sharing your questions with the group! I’m most certainly interested to know the answers!
        It may be that one of our colleagues has some experience with this, otherwise I will hand over to Elke to answer you as this is her area of expertise.

      2. Hello Catherine

        Great to see that you are trying to get things to work.

        i) ANU Marketing is working on a signature block template incorporating the ORCID along with new business card options as well and they should be out soon. In the meantime I just typed it in manually.

        ii) As ORCID is based in the US it uses the term ‘dissertation’ for a thesis. Select Publication from the Work Category and Dissertation from Work Type and it should display much better.

        As part of the Australian ORCiD Consortium, ANU will be advocating research publication data uploads from university repositories such as ANU Open Research. Consequently, if you are unable to upload the majority of your publication details using the options detailed above, we will be happy to work with you to get all of your research publications in to the Open Research repository, with a view to then being ready to upload this data to your ORCiD when this functionality is enabled.

        1. Dear Elke, thank you for your helpful responses to my questions. I will do as you suggest and let let you know if I run into challenges I cannot overcome.
          Cheers

    2. Hi again Anne,
      Candida, Elke and I are chuffed to hear you’ve gotten value out of today’s practical activity, especially when you are at the edge of your comfort zone.

      I like your idea to schedule in some achievable tasks over time so that you can enrich your profile and become more comfortable in this space. That’s inspired me to do the same.
      Re: the offline/online distinction you make, some food for thought in that for us all.

      Looking forward to your insights in Day 3 tomorrow.

  8. I created a Medley account and imported my ORCID and Scopus data (the link on my name is to my new Mendeley id).
    This worked very well, but what I found annoying was only after I authorized this did I discover that I had signed up to a Elsevier product. I don’t mind signing up with a for-profit service, but I would like to know that is what it is, before I authorize it to suck up all my data, to make money.
    Also I signed up for Kudos and Figshare, which were a little more difficult to use than Medley.
    But why do I need any, or all, of these? Which are for-profit and how do these companies make a profit: by selling my personal details? What do the educational institutions get out of this? What do I get out of this?
    The digital identity health check sounds a good idea, but it is an eleven page PDF document. What I want is a tool which runs the check interactively.

    1. Hi Tom,
      It’s important to weigh the good and the not-so-good, isn’t it! Thank you for sharing your experiences with us today.
      In Day 3, you’ll have a chance to exercise some lateral thinking around ways to address issues you’ve identified – get ready to share your Blue Sky ideas!

  9. Alice, be careful what you wish for. Every post I make to my blog is now automatically indexed as a scholarly work. The novelty of having hundreds of publications wore off when I realized every silly little blog post I make is listed.

  10. Hi everyone,
    That’s a wrap from us today.
    However, keep the contributions coming and we’d love you to join us for a face-to-face conversation over a coffee.
    10am, Thursday 16 Nov, Coffee Lab, ANU Pop-Up
    Please RSVP to karlene.dickens@anu.edu.au

    Looking forward to Day 3
    Candida, Elke and Imogen

  11. Hi Everyone

    I have now set up my Mendeley account, and linked it to my ORCHID id. This process has motivated me to get moving on the publications that I have in progress, so that I have some publications to include in my accounts! I am very much looking forward to learning more about networking via Mendeley.

    I am very much looking forward to day 3.
    Tracey

  12. I set up an ORCID account. All went OK until I put a second email address in – this repeatedly resulted in notifications that the primary email would have to be verified & this would happen via an email to me. This email didn’t come & there was then a message about a problem with the server. I did link it to my Mendeley account. This seems a good move, as you can easily add your publications from Mendeley to Orcid. Will now set up the profile info & it will be the same for both. Not sure about Kudos – will leave that for the moment. Can’t see how to get the ORCID ID with the logo onto my email signature.

    1. Hi Lawrence, it’s great that you’ve jumped right in. Did the ORCID email eventually arrive? If not, feel free to email me imogen.ingram@anu.edu.au.
      I think choosing a platform like Mendeley to talk to your ORCID profile is a savvy way to gain the visibility benefits of a social platform along with all the benefits of the ORCID tool.
      Re the ORCID logo, I have contacted Elke Dawson and will post this information back here for the benefit of the Coffee Course community.

  13. Later: sort of getting on top of this. Mendeley seems to import your profile information selectively from ORCID, & you end up having to change it manually. Kudos is a different beast altogether with the ‘plain language’ options. May be useful.

  14. Yes, Kudos is very different. You can see why it’s been a hit with the science community re expressing the technical in lay terms. Good practice for engagement with the public!
    I imagine that yes, there’ll be tweaking the imported information from one tool to another. Let me know how you get on with it.

    1. Being a bit nervous about the process, I had entered my second email to ORCID incorrectly. All sorted now. Mendeley imports your publications, research interests, but not your biography from ORCID. When you change your ORCID info, you have to disconnect and reconnect Mendeley to import the changes.
      That said, ORCID functionality is brilliant. Being able to import your publications in bibtex format is very efficient. I was surprised that I could easily import things I’d published in the 80s & 90s, for example. I worked out how to put the logo in front of the ORCID address in my email signature. You can just download the logo in various sizes from the ORCID website. Having my bio on ORCID has already paid off. Yesterday the person chairing the session at a conference where I’m presenting shortly emailed to ask for a brief bio. I was just able to point her to the one on my ORCID site, & that was enough.

      1. Lawrence – that’s fantastic! Such a quick win. Good to hear the time you’ve invested is already paying dividends!
        That’s interesting that you needed to disconnect and reconnect Mendeley from ORCID to import any fresh changes to ORCID info.

  15. To add in a further thing to remember that has not been touched on above, for those of you who have for whatever reason decided to change your name mid-career (in my case, married! thanks phd journey for this wonderful and unexpected positive externality!), ORCID is great because it is a unique identifier that is linked to you and only you. So it helps clear up any confusion and means everything is captured in one spot. While the idea of a unique identifier is deeply problematic at a government level – remember the Australia card furore! – in the academic context it is useful and helpful. I think. Maybe this will come back to bite me…

  16. Hi, I enjoyed this and linked my SCOPUS and ORCID accounts today. It was relatively Easy but SCOPUS was a bit of a fiddle to find how to link to ORCID.
    I also did a digital health check and i was surprised by the results. I came up correctly in 10/11 top results. These included my ANU page and my affiliation to other centres at ANU, the Conversation, Twitter and Facebook as well as the AAS.

  17. I registered with ORCiD. Easy enough to register but it will take some time to enter all the information. The list of types of “work” is a bit limited and might not suit those with non-traditional research outputs – for example, there’s no obvious way to categorise an essay for an exhibition catalogue. I also couldn’t find a way to categorise conference reviews or papers in conference proceedings, which seem like major oversights to me.
    Once I started with ORCiD, it got me started tracking down all my various professional profiles, including ones I had forgotten about such as Google Scholar. Also checked my ANU Researcher profile and discovered it was about 5 years out of date! I’ve started a Google Docs document with a list of all the profiles so hopefully I don’t forget them again.

  18. As I mentioned in my Day 1 post, I’ve made profiles on most academic networking tools relevant to my field. From my experience, I had a tough time organizing my Scopus account and had to contact them a few times on verifying my profile and getting my papers assigned to me. Ever since then it’s been low down on my list of preferred profiling tools.

    I definitely had a much easier time with setting up my ORCiD account and it was great that in a lot of future registrations I could just provide my ORCiD ID and most data and info would transfer. As mentioned by some people in previous comments it’s also been really handy to be able to just submit the ORCiD ID to conference organizers etc as they can get most info on my bio and previous works there.

  19. I am registered with ORCiD, I have an ANU researcher ID. I will investigate more about Scopus, and Google Scholar. In the Digital identity health check I liked the following sections: Create a single home for your online presence; Link your profiles together. I am sure about where my single home will be yet or how to link all the profiles together, but I do like the idea of including this information in the email signature etc, thank you.

  20. Thank you for sharing these resources. I was aware of Mendeley as a reference management system, akin to Endnote, but I didn’t realise it had this networking function as well. Like others I am a bit concerned about the effort of maintaining profiles on many different platforms, so I am glad to hear that the ORCiD can help transfer over content. The digital identity health check is very helpful too.

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