As I was preparing my annual review documentation this spring I wanted to see if I could more easily import my work published on Humanities Commons into Academic Profile, MSU’s annual reporting system that uses Watermark’s Faculty Success platform.
Manual entry is always a possibility, but ideally, I want everything to be electronically connected to make it seamless and to reduce the possibility of duplication, or more likely omission, of some works. I identified two possible ways to accomplish this.
Possibility #1 – Google Scholar
I noticed a while back that Google Scholar lists any works I have contributed to Humanities Commons in my profile there. There’s no connection to the Academic Profile system, but there is a BibTeX export. I was able to select the works I wanted to include and then in the export option that appears (you have to select works before it appears), I downloaded the BibTeX file. A simple import in Academic Profile (which takes a long time) added the works to my profile. However, there was very little data included (specifically only Title, Author, and sometimes Year). One can hand enter the additional data in Google Scholar or in Academic Profile, but that’s additional work that almost makes it not worth the import/export function given the extra time it takes.
Possibility #2 – ORCiD
ORCiD proved to be a better option. Because Humanities Commons isn’t a data provider to ORCiD there’s no automated connection to get your deposits to show up, but ORCiD has a handy feature to add a work by pasting the DOI into the Works section. I created a list of the DOIs that I wanted to add and clicked the Add button and pasted the DOI (works with just the value or full URL) for the deposit into the popup.
Using this method provided a much richer set of information that, while still requiring me to double-check it and change a few things, was a lot less work than manually entering the paper.
After that was set in ORCiD I was able to make use of the Import feature of Academic Profile. Currently, this only works for the Publications and Papers section of Academic Profile but I’m hopeful it will be enabled for Creative Works and Exhibits and Performances soon. Pressing the Import button gives you the option to connect your ORCiD and then search your profile to find publications to import. The import process seems to take less time than the BibTeX import and it eliminates the need to download and upload the file.
Overall Thoughts
While the ORCiD process seemed like one more step (import to ORCiD and then import to Academic Profile) I found when I sat down to think about it that it’s the same number of steps as Google Scholar (export from Google and import to Academic Profile) and you don’t have to deal with a file download and upload (way easier when you are on an iPad to not deal with that). The additional information that the ORCiD import brings over saves some time, and their interface is much cleaner and easier to use.
A pain point I discovered for my work is that the list of work types in ORCiD doesn’t fully reflect the work I do. There was no work type for worksheets or instructional documents, for example, but they do have a pretty long list of work types that provides a lot of options.
The ORCiD process is one I’m going to adopt moving forward, and it will be even easier when Humanities Commons deposits are automatically recognized by ORCiD. Depending on how active you are this could be a monthly process that takes very little time and helps to keep your work accurately tracked.