Use of Research Organizations Registry (ROR) identifiers in author academic profiles: the case of Google Scholar Profiles

Abstract

Research organizations' persistent identifiers allow for reducing affiliation ambiguities, enable accurate institutional analyses and favor the design of modern online scholarly databases suited for research discovery and research evaluation. However, few studies have attempted to quantify their degree of use. Precisely, the purpose of this work is to determine the use of Research Organizations Registry (ROR) IDs in author academic profiles, specifically in Google Scholar Profiles (GSP). To do this, all the Google Scholar profiles including the term ROR in any of the public descriptive fields were collected and analyzed. The results evidence a low use of ROR IDs (1,033 profiles), mainly from a few institutions (e.g. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, and Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in Ecuador hold 55.7% of all profiles), from low citation-based impact authors (45.1% of profiles attain less than 100 citations each), belonging mainly to Social Sciences (26.3%), Engineering fields (25.3%), and Natural Sciences (22.2%). Although Google Scholar does not facilitate the inclusion of identifiers, it seems that the world's leading research institutions are not recommending their researchers include these identifiers in their profiles yet.