Increase your visibility

Increase the visibility of your publications and your research by keeping track of them, identifying them with unique digital identifiers and making your research open! Nowadays, as the research output is expanding exponentially, it is crucial for researchers to enhance their visibility. By doing so, they increase their collaboration potential with other researchers; enable easier knowledge exchange; advance their career, including funding possibilities; and make their research accessible to the broader public.

Author profiles

Use a researcher identifier (ID) to keep track of your publications and make yourself unique in the research world. Research identifiers are unique digital identifiers that assist researchers in connecting their works and differentiate them from individuals with similar names.

Our recommendations

Register yourself for an ORCID and use this ID in each work (e.g. article, data) you publish
Use the same variation of your name consistently on all your publications
Check automatically-generated identifiers (e.g. in Web of Science and Scopus) for their correctness
Use the standard version of your institutional affiliation:
- Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
- Empa. Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
- Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL)
- Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)

The most common author digital identifiers are:
ORCID (Open researcher and contributor ID) is an open digital identifier available to all without any costs (registration link). It is widely used in the research community as it allows for machine-readable connections between the ID and works, organization and other IDs and connects funders, repositories and publishers. One can add automatically works from other databases and edit their profile to add information such as affiliation and previous employment as well. Nowadays, ORCID is often even a requirement by some publishers and funders.
Researcher ID is a unique identifier from Web of Science that is automatically created once publications of an author are indexed in the database. Author profile pages are also automatically created with a collection of their works. You can claim your author profile any time (after you have articles indexed in Web of Science) by searching for your name in Web of Science and then clicking "Verify your Author Record" on the top right.
Scopus author identifier is a unique identifier from Scopus that is automatically created once publications of an author are indexed in the database. In contrast to the Web of Science Research ID, one cannot claim or edit their Scopus Author Identifier. Nevertheless, you can check your profile and can ask for merging of more than one profiles that belong to you through the Author Feedback Wizard. If you notice mistakes to your affiliation, you can contact us to inform Scopus.
Google Scholar author profile: Increase further your visibility by creating an author profile in Google Scholar. Registration is free and you have control of your profile, e.g. editing your affiliation, adding works etc. Google indexes your publications and adds them automatically to your profile (this can be configured).
Only an online profile?
Besides making your work unique and yourself standing out in the research community, having research profiles has more advantages as well.
Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar index citations on your publications and make calculations that provide an indication of your impact on science. You can check your collaborations, publication trends and more. See our website regarding bibliometrics to learn more about these analyses and which services we offer on this wide topic.
Make your publication unique and readily cited by adding a unique identifier to it. Most publishers already provide a unique identifier for your publication, nevertheless, if not, you can add one yourself.
Most common research identifiers:
DOI: Issuing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for your publication or data has many advantages; it is an internationally recognized identifier, a permanent online link, thus making it easier to attribute research output long-term. Lib4RI can provide a DOI for your work under some conditions.
ISBN: For works that are only in print format or that you would like to distribute in print format, an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) can be issued. Contact us to provide you with an ISBN (this service is available for researchers of Eawag, Empa and PSI).
ISSN: This identifier is an 8-digit number that is used for e.g. journal, magazine or conference proceeding issues. Registering an ISSN can be useful in specific cases, e.g. if you would like your work (e.g. conference proceedings) to be indexed in a database like Scopus. You can apply for an ISSN through the Swiss National Library.

Open research

A important step to increase your visibility and your research impact is to make your work open to the research world. We recommend the following:

Publish Open Access (OA) and whenever possible use the CC BY license. There are many options to publish OA (gold, hybrid, green) and we offer support in various ways. See our website for more information on how you can benefit from our service in publishing OA. Alternatively, you can use our search tool to see directly how we can support you in publishing OA in a specific journal.
Share your data on OA data repositories to make them available and reusable. Eawag, WSL and PSI curate their own data repositories and affiliated researchers are encouraged to store their data there. In areas where well-established subject or data-type specific repositories exist, submit data to the appropriate resources. Repository indexing services like re3data.org and FAIRsharing.org help to find discipline-specific repositories suitable for your data. If there are no discipline-specific repositories suitable for your data, you might want to use a generalist data repository, e.g. Dryad, Open Science Framework or Zenodo.
Share your research code on e.g. a git repository like Github or Bitbucket, store it on a repository that issues persistent identifiers (e.g. Zenodo) and use an open source license for your code.