SelectedWorks

ORCID is a powerful tool for managing academic identities, ensuring proper attribution, enhancing discoverability, and reducing administrative burdens; provides a unique, persistent identifier. 

• Best for: ORCID is best for uniquely identifying researchers and ensuring accurate attribution of their scholarly outputs across platforms and institutions to maintain a consistent record of their work.
• Features: Offers a unique ID, comprehensive researcher profiles, integration with academic systems, automatic updates, verified contributions, and UCF institutional login.
• Advantages: Improves name disambiguation, enhances recognition across platforms, saves time with automatic updates, boosts transparency, supports long-term use across careers and boosts visibility, credibility, and discoverability of research.
• Things to consider: Researchers should regularly update their profiles, ensure linked contributions are accurate, and remember that works must be hosted elsewhere to be linked in their profiles.

ResearchGate is a popular academic social networking platform where researchers can share their publications, connect with peers, ask questions, find collaborators, and track the impact of their work. 

• Best for: ResearchGate is best for sharing scholarly articles, presentations, and creative works within academic research contexts, enabling researchers to connect with peers for collaboration and networking.
• Features: ResearchGate offers profile creation, publication uploads, project sharing, Q&A forums, project management, and research networking, allowing academics to upload various scholarly outputs, enhance visibility, and track the impact of their work with metrics like views and citations.
• Advantages: ResearchGate allows academics to upload various scholarly outputs, such as publications, datasets, presentations, images, and videos, enhancing visibility, fostering collaboration, providing metrics like views and citations to track impact, and connecting researchers across disciplines through its strong community features.
• Things to consider: Researchers should be aware that while ResearchGate can increase visibility, it does not provide a permanent archive for research outputs, and content availability may depend on publisher policies regarding sharing.

Academia.edu is a widely used platform for sharing research papers, monitoring analytics, discovering new research, and connecting researchers with peers in their field.

• Best for: Academia.edu is best for researchers looking to share their academic papers and connect with other scholars in their field.
• Features: Academia.edu offers profile creation, paper uploads, analytics on views and citations, and the ability to follow researchers and research topics.
• Advantages: Academia.edu increases the discoverability of research by allowing users to upload papers and research, provides analytics on scholarly impact based on views and citations, and facilitates networking with other academics globally.
• Things to consider: Researchers should be mindful that while Academia.edu facilitates sharing, it may not provide a permanent archive for papers, and the platform has been criticized for its commercialization and data privacy practices.

Google Scholar Profiles allow researchers to create a public profile that showcases their publications and citations.  

• Best for: Google Scholar Profiles are best for researchers who want to showcase their publications and track citations across their academic work.
• Features: Google Scholar Profiles offer automatic publication tracking, citation metrics, h-index calculation, and customizable profiles.
• Advantages: Google Scholar Profiles enhance visibility, provide real-time citation tracking, offer metrics to assess scholarly impact, and require minimal upkeep due to automatic updates.
• Things to consider: Researchers should be aware that Google Scholar Profiles require occasional manual oversight to ensure accuracy and that their visibility may be limited by the platform’s indexing and search algorithms.