How librarians can relieve administrative burdens and drive researcher effectiveness
In today’s fast-paced world of research, time has become an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. An independent study commissioned by Ex Libris revealed that “academic researchers face a significant challenge in finding enough time to effectively manage their research activities.” According to the Ex Libris Research Advisory Council, researchers at their institutions allocate approximately 45% of their time to administrative tasks.
Another pressing issue highlighted in the study is the burden of maintaining researcher profiles. Keeping a single profile updated is challenging, but the situation becomes even more daunting when dealing with multiple platforms across the internet. The study indicates that 20% of researchers use five or more different profile platforms simultaneously, adding to their administrative load.
The paper Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science zeroes in on the detrimental effects of multiple time-consuming profile platforms:
“There is a real risk that early career researchers aiming to enhance their profile and optimize their visibility may spend more time updating their profile in multiple networking platforms than continuing to be academically productive.”
If a researcher neglects their profiles, this can lead to a cascade of potentially serious consequences. Discovery and collaboration can be jeopardized, which can undermine the reach and effectiveness of their research. For librarians and administrators, the volume and caliber of research directly contributes to the scholarly reputation of their institution.
The situation becomes a catch-22: on the one hand, maintaining researcher profiles takes valuable time away from critical research work, while inadequate profiles may impede the impact of research, posing challenges to both researchers and their affiliated institutions.
Librarians play a pivotal role in supporting researchers
Scholarly communications librarians and subject liaisons serve as key advisors to faculty, providing guidance on content, analytics and workflow tools available to ensure they are successful. This support extends to the promotion of their work without compromising valuable research time. When it comes to researcher profiles, integrated, multi-faceted and easily updated profiles are essential to amplify the reach of their work with minimal manual effort.
Addressing this need, Clarivate™ has created a resource that builds on the strength and integrity of the Web of Science™. Web of Science Researcher Profiles provide a comprehensive 360-degree view of a researcher’s contributions, encompassing publications, preprints, peer reviews, citation metrics and journal editing work – all in one place. Through seamless integrations, automation and purposeful design, these profiles also streamline researchers’ workflows and enrich their understanding of their field and their place within it.
Read on to learn how Web of Science Researcher Profiles can save researchers time and build their effectiveness.
Unlocking visibility and contribution across platforms
Web of Science Researcher Profiles play a pivotal role in elevating researchers’ visibility within the global research community. Open and visible to everyone, these profiles showcase an individual’s publications and citations alongside publisher-verified peer reviews and editorships, helping them demonstrate a complete view of their achievements and attract potential collaborators and funders. As evaluators increasingly emphasize the real-world outcomes of basic research, Web of Science profiles help researchers highlight the innovations built upon their work, citing patent information as evidence. Researchers can also enhance their profiles with preprint and post-publication reviews, provide early career researchers an opportunity to showcase their expertise to editors while honing their manuscript analysis skills.
Researchers aspire to reach a wide audience with their rich, compelling profiles, necessitating effective management of their presence across multiple platforms. As surveys have shown, the time-intensive process of increasing visibility hinders time which could be spent on progressing basic research, leading to potential errors and omissions when rekeying data across various systems. To alleviate this challenge, Web of Science profiles integrate seamlessly with ORCID, synchronizing updates across platforms. The result is that researchers gain the visibility they need, but spend less time keying in their accomplishments and can dedicate more time to progress new projects and impactful research.
Automation and personalization for effective profile management and networking
For librarians advising early career researchers who are establishing their profile for the first time, the Web of Science simplifies the process by offering automatically generated, disambiguated author records for all published researchers in the Web of Science Core Collection™. With a little manual startup, researchers can conveniently set up their profiles and allow the Web of Science to automatically update them with new publications and preprints from the Web of Science Core Collection and the Preprint Citation Index™.
Personalization options in Web of Science profiles keep those same researchers informed on their research landscape, supporting their career growth and influence. For example, they can monitor the influence of their papers through automated weekly email alerts, notifying them of new articles which cite their work. Additionally, they can stay abreast of the most relevant and impactful research in their field while also discovering emerging and established researchers working in similar areas.
Researchers often seek to collaborate with diverse co-authors to enhance their research and expand their professional networks. To address that need, Web of Science Researcher Profiles include valuable recommendations, facilitating connections between researchers beyond their known academic networks. By discovering new collaboration opportunities, researchers can uncover greater innovation opportunities, ultimately aligning with their university’s mission.
Promoting responsible research assessment
Clarivate understands that a researcher’s career cannot be properly represented by a single metric. Hence, the Web of Science Researcher Profiles go beyond time-saving automation and integration to empower researchers to showcase their influence and impact through a combination of factors including peer review data, citation metrics and compelling visualizations.
Among the visualizations are Author Impact Beamplots, which were introduced in 2021. Author Impact Beamplots enable assessors to delve deeper into a researcher’s publication portfolio. These beamplots illustrate the volume and citation impact of an individual’s publication portfolio over time, with percentiles normalized against time and subject area, to allow for better comparisons across fields. This contemporary and more accurate approach aligns with broader community efforts to reform research assessment and encourages the responsible use of metrics.
Building on the strength of the Web of Science
The Web of Science, renowned as the most trusted, publisher-independent database, has long been a valuable resource for researchers and institutions worldwide. Through Web of Science Researcher Profiles, your researchers can showcase their work on a trusted platform used by more than 15 million of their peers at more than 9,000 institutions worldwide. This visibility not only benefits researchers, but also offers a significant advantage to funders and potential collaborators who can discover the expertise and accomplishments of researchers at your institution. With Web of Science Researcher profiles, researchers’ profiles are surfaced throughout Web of Science data and across various platform experiences, bolstering collaboration opportunities and scholarly connections.
Want to save researchers time and help them be more effective? Let’s talk.
