Step One: Set up your profile

1. Go to scholar.google.com and (if you are not already logged in) click “sign in” in the upper right corner. Sign in using your WMICH credentials.
2. Click on “My Profile” in the upper left hand corner 
3. Complete your name, affiliation, and email address at this time.
4. You will need to use your WMU email address.
5. Later, check your email to complete the verification process. This will authorize Google Scholar to display your affiliation as “verified.”

Step Two: Link your scholarship to your profile

1. Google Scholar will suggest articles written by you  Some may be yours, and some may not be, especially if you have a common name. If you are a prolific researcher, or if you have a very common name, there may be many publications to review the first time you set up your profile. If there are publications that don’t belong to you, click the check box beside each and then click “delete.” This will remove the record for that item from your profile.

2.  If Google has identified multiple records that are really referring to the same work, you can click the checkbox next to all records that refer to the same work and click “merge.

3. There may also be some types of articles that you don't want to include (Google indexes lots of content such as newsletters, book reviews etc, not just scholarly articles). 
4. If you do not have any publications, Google Scholar will present you with some options for publications that it thinks could belong to you. Unfortunately, in order to move forward with the process, you will have to accept one of these and then later remove it from your profile
5.  When you're done, click "Next." 

Step Three: Fine tune your profile

1. Do you want Google Scholar to automatically add your publications to your profile as it finds them (without you having to do anything), or do you want it to send you an email with publications to review before they appear on your profile? This is up to you, and you can change it later if you wish.
2. Do you want your profile to be public? If you check the box to make it public, you’ll be more “Googleable” by others. If you have a long list of publications to review (from step 3) and haven’t gone through them all yet, you may wish to set your profile to private until you’re confident that the work represented on it is all truly yours, and then switch it to public. You can always change your profile from private to public and vice versa.
3. Add keywords relating to your research and add a link to your University home page (if you have one)
4. Add a photo if you want to personalize your profile. 

Final Step

Click on "Follow” in the upper right hand corner of your profile page to receive email alerts for any new publications associated with you, as well as new citations of your work. (Tip: you can “follow” new publications and new citations for any researcher with a public Google Scholar profile, not just yourself.

LinkedIn is a professional networking and job-seeking site popular both within and outside of academia: 

• ​Ensure your profile is 100% complete. Complete profiles are more useful and may be retrieved faster than incomplete profiles
• Update your profile regularly so connections will be made aware of changes
• Make good use of your "headline" which can accommodate up to 120 characters. Use this to highlight your current and future research interests, and anything that distinguishes you from others on LinkedIn 
• Insert keywords in highly visible locations such as headlines, job titles, company names, skills, etc
• Join and contribute to discussions and groups
• Endorsements allow close contacts the ability to endorse specific skills. Every time you receive an endorsement, you are branding yourself 
• Turn on "Views of this profile also viewed" so your profile will appear in search results when someone views a similar profile that contains the same keywords as your profile
• Customize your public profile URL. The address should look something like: www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. 
• Primary audience is non-academics

ResearchGate is a for-profit, professional network site for researchers and academics: 

• ResearchGate profile includes: a dashboard-like overview, citations to published work, contact and career information, research interests, links to citations of potential interest, and selected impact metrics
• Users are mainly from sciences or engineering 
• For-profit company
• Includes discussion boards so can post questions, provide answers or simply join or track the conversation. 
• Includes a job board
• Can create alerts for people, articles, and discussion boards
• Makes recommendations on who to follow based on your citations, whose cited you, papers, who you follow, top co-authors, and your area of research
• Compiles statistics on your profile, including your reads, recommendations, views, and requests for full text

Where to Create Research Profiles

There are numerous sources for setting up additional researcher profiles to highlight your work and to network with others in your field. Generic sites include Academia.edu, and Mendeley.

Discipline specific examples include:

Biosketches (National Institute of Health)

• NIH researcher profile required for both grant applications and progress reports.
• SciENcv--tool to assist with creating researcher biosketch
• Can be setup to automatically pull biographical information & publications from an ORCID profile.

Humanities Commons  

• Nonprofit network where humanities scholars can create a professional profile, discuss common interests, develop new publications, and share their work

Personal Pages

Some researchers choose to set up their own personal web page to serve as a way to highlight research, and other activities. Two of the ways to do this are through Google Sites and Github. Examples:

• Personal page in Github
• Personal page in Google Sites