Make sure you only publish information on your research profiles that you are happy and legally allowed to disclose to others. For Example, ORCID allows you to only display your name and ORCID ID number to the public, while you account is populated with your publications for grant applications, etc.
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.
Before you create a new profile consider whether you have enough time to regularly monitor the profile and keep it up-to-date. It is advantageous to select one, such as ORCID, to be your primary account to update and check periodically.
If you decide to use a new tool, make sure you customize your email notification and update settings so that you can use the tool efficiently and do not receive too many notifications.
Set up an ORCID identifier and include your ORCID ID on your profile sites, social media accounts, and email signature.
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.
Adapted from the University of Melbourne Library.