Highlighting Faculty Research: The Researcher Profile Audit Service

Background:
Numerous systems have emerged which capture a researcher’s scholarly output, including ORCiD, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. When looking for information on faculty publications, we frequently find inaccurate and incomplete profiles as well as duplicate profiles. Having accurate researcher profiles is important for differentiating publications of authors with similar names, complying with funder mandates, and demonstrating impact for promotion and tenure. Consequently, the Himmelfarb Library sought to help researchers take control of these profiles. The objective of this poster is to demonstrate how the Researcher Profile Audit Service helped researchers improve the quality of their author profiles.


Description:
The Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library at the George Washington University serves the needs of students, faculty, and staff from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, the School of Nursing, and the School of Public Health. As a result of the challenges outlined above, librarians at the Himmelfarb Library developed a service to help patrons improve their researcher profiles, the Researcher Profile Audit. We identified six platforms (Scopus, ORCID, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Publons, and ResearchGate) as our initial area of focus. We created a service description, intake form, and dissemination strategy for a six month beta test.
The Researcher Profile Audit Service was launched on November 4th, 2020 and was offered to all faculty. Recipients of pilot awards from the CTSI-CN were specifically invited to participate as a part of their program. To date, we have performed 32 audits.

Conclusion:
2020 saw an unprecedented growth of scientific journal content thanks to research associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. More than ever it is important for researchers to have accurate researcher profiles. While still in the beta phase, our Researcher Profile Audit Service has received positive feedback from faculty.
Librarians working with the Researcher Profile Audit Service are reconceptualizing the services that libraries provide in order to help make institutional content more visible, while also building new relationships with faculty. This service reinforces the central role that the library can play in regard to the dissemination of content in emerging systems.