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Make sure you only publish information on your research profiles that you are happy and legally allowed to disclose to others.
See the University of Melbourne Social Media Guidelines for more information.
It is important to check the user agreement for each tool you use to find out:
If you have published a paper, you should check the journal publisher's policy conditions before uploading it. You can use the database SHERPA/RoMEO to find publisher's policies.
Many publishers allow researchers free use of the ‘author’s original manuscript’ or ‘author’s accepted manuscript’, but it is important to check any publishing agreement you sign.
You must only share material in which you own copyright, or have the appropriate rights to do so.
Before you create a new profile consider whether you have enough time to regularly monitor the profile and keep it up-to-date.
If you decide to use a new tool, make sure you customise your email notification and update settings so that you can use the tool efficiently and do not receive too many notifications.
Citation counts should be used with other qualitative measures.
No single tool can provide a comprehensive measurement of research publication impact.
Tools that provide citation metrics, such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, can only gather metrics based on the publications they index.
You should remember that:
You could consider alternative metrics, or altmetrics, such as the number of times your research outputs are viewed, downloaded, bookmarked, discussed or shared online, for example on social media websites.
Altmetrics may be particularly useful for measuring the impact of grey literature, for example any of your research outputs which have not been published in books or journals, such as posters, patents, preprints, theses, reports or working papers.