Data Management Plan for Usage of Academic Profile Websites (Exemplar)

Academic profile websites are online platforms where researchers create their professional profiles, and organize and showcase their research outputs. Examples of academic profiles websites include Google Scholar Citations, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). Recent years have seen an increasing adoption of these websites among researchers, mainly because of the perceived value for facilitating collaboration and boosting research impact. While librarians are providing assistance to researchers in developing profiles on these platforms, it is unknown how librarians themselves, as researchers, are using these tools. This project will investigate the presence on the academic profile websites amongst librarian researchers (i.e. librarians whose professional responsibilities include the requirement of conducting research) in the United States and Canada. The results from this project will provide a more complete understanding of academic profile websites, identify new directions for improving the functionalities of these sites, and discover opportunities for providing new library services to the research community.