Profiles make your work visible

Beyond identifiers, profiles present your work to readers. The most useful free one is the Google Scholar Profile: it gathers your papers, shows citation counts, and computes your h-index and i10-index automatically.

Academic networks — useful, but be critical

Sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu offer reach and discussion. But they are commercial, for-profit platforms: they are not open infrastructure, their metrics are their own, and uploading a paper there can breach a publisher’s copyright. Treat them as shop windows — not as the anchor of your identity. That anchor should be your open ORCID iD.

Worked example — a Google Scholar profile in minutes
Create a Google Scholar profile, confirm the papers that are yours, and it instantly shows your total citations, h-index, and i10-index — and keeps updating as new citations arrive. A free, public snapshot of your impact.

🔗 Learn more (free): Google Scholar — set up your profile

Try it
Create or find your Google Scholar profile and note your h-index. Then ask: is my open ORCID iD also set up, so I am not relying only on a commercial platform?

Self-check

Give one reason a for-profit academic network is a poor substitute for an open identifier like ORCID.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) and institutional research-support materials. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Modifié le: jeudi 4 juin 2026, 12:41