Increasing your Scholarly Impact (College of Law Faculty)

While having works uploaded to SSRN used to be the gold standard for exposing legal research online, new research suggests that increasing the number of places where a scholar's work can be found and accessed increases both exposure (as counted in downloads) and citations.

A discussion draft by Caroline Osborne and Stephanie Miller, The Scholarly Impact Matrix: An Empirical Study of How Multiple Metrics Create an Informed Story of a Scholar's Work, noted the following:

• The presence of a HeinOnline Author Profile positively impacts citation across all platforms they analyzed.
• The presence of a Google Scholar profile increases exposure (downloads) from both SSRN and institutional repositories (IRs). The effect is more pronounced for SSRN downloads than for IR downloads. The presence of a Google Scholar profile also positively impacts citation across all analyzed platforms (including Westlaw and Lexis) except for HeinOnline.

Things to do first:

1. ORCiD:

• Register for your ORCiD ID (should take about 1 minute).

2. SSRN:

• Ensure your institutional affiliation, title and position information is correct on your Author Page (1-5 minutes, depending on how much updating is needed).
• While you're in SSRN, add your ORCiD ID (1-2 minutes).

3. HeinOnline:

• Edit the information on your Author Profile as needed (1-5 minutes).
• Link your ORCiD ID  (1-2 minutes).
• Set up publication alerts to be notified by email when Hein adds works to your Author Profile (less than 1 minute).

Next, tackle these projects (time will vary, depending on how much work needs to be done):

4. HeinOnline:

• Check that your works listed on your Author Profile are accurate and inform Hein if they’re not (time varies).
• Send your publications in HeinOnline to your ORCiD account (1-5 minutes).
  • Important: to reduce the amount of clean-up needed in your ORCiD account, do not do this step until the works listed on your Author Profile page are correct.
• Add any of your publications that are not in HeinOnline to your ORCiD account -- as of August 2020, these publications will then appear in HeinOnline.

5. Google Scholar:

• Set up (or enhance) your Google Scholar profile.

6. SSRN:

• Ensure all your works are posted and that the version of each work is the one you want posted.