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Northern Illinois University
College of Law
David C. Shapiro Memorial Law Library

Increasing your Scholarly Impact (College of Law Faculty)

Why Multiple Profiles are Needed

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 new 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.

Get Started in 15 Minutes or Less

Things to do first:

1. ORCiD:

2. SSRN:

3. HeinOnline:

Next Steps

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:

6. SSRN:

The Law Library: A Partner in Your Scholarly Visibility

  Faculty member needs to: Library will:
Your faculty webpage Supply updated information to the law library about new publications and activities Maintain page
Huskie Commons Inform the library about new publications; provide a copy Upload all faculty works that meet deposit requirements
ORCiD Set up account; enhance as desired Provide guidance if needed. Can update publications list if you designate Matt Timko as a Trusted Individual in ORCiD.
SSRN Set up account; ensure title and affiliation are correct Upload new works upon request and add to the NIU COL Research Paper Series
HeinOnline Author Profile Ensure publications are correct; set up link to ORCiD Maintain profile information & link to SSRN
Google Scholar Set up profile; verify publications to be added Provide guidance, if needed

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