Google Scholar Profile – The basics

If you’re a researcher in Africa, you’ve probably used Google Scholar as a search engine to help you find research articles. But did you know you can also use it as a tool to help boost your research profile by publicly displaying your research work?

What is a Google Scholar Profile?

A Google Scholar Profile is a feature of Google Scholar that provides a platform for researchers to showcase their academic publications.

There’s a list of ways that a Google Scholar profile can help you, including showcasing your academic publications publicly in an easy-to-use platform, tracking who is citing your articles, increasing your visibility as a researcher, and allowing potential collaborators or other people who are interested in your research to reach out to you.

Google Scholar is free and easy to set up and maintain. Even if an author has written hundreds of articles, and even if their name is shared by several different scholars, they can easily manage their profile.

Citation metrics are updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to authors’ work on the web. Authors can choose to have their list of articles updated automatically, or review the updates themselves.

How to set up a Google Scholar profile

Setting up a Google Scholar Profile is quick and easy. Here’s how to do it:

   1. Sign in to your Google account, or create one if you don’t have one. It’s recommended to use a personal account, not an account at your institution, so that you can keep your profile for as long as you wish. Remember that you may lose access to your institutional account once you leave the institution.

   2. Open the Scholar profile sign up form.

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   3. Confirm the spelling of your name, enter your affiliation, interests, and other details requested. You can now enter your university email address – this is what Google will use to allow your profile to be displayed in Google search results. Note that Google Scholar will not use a personal email to verify your affiliation, so this step is important.

   4. On the next page, you’ll see groups of articles written by people with names similar to yours. Add all articles that you have written. Remember to only add your own articles.

   5. Once you’re done with adding articles, it will ask you what to do when the article data changes in Google Scholar. You can either have the updates applied to your profile automatically, or you can choose to review them beforehand. In either case, you can always go to your profile and make changes by hand.

   6. Finally, you will see your profile. This is a good time to add a few finishing touches – upload your professional-looking photo, visit your university email inbox and click on the verification link, double-check the list of articles, and, once you’re completely satisfied, make your profile public1.

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