Consider what information you should disclose

Make sure you only publish information on your research profiles that you are happy and legally allowed to disclose to others.

See the Mayo Clinic Social Media Guidelines for more information.

Check the user agreement

It is important to check the user agreement for each tool you use to find out:

• Who will have access to your data,
• How long it will be retained, and
• How easy it is to delete an account.

Consider the time commitment

Before you create a new profile consider whether you have enough time to regularly monitor the profile and keep it up-to-date.

Customize your settings

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.

Check copyright conditions and publishing agreements

If you have published a paper, you should check the journal’s copyright conditions before uploading it.

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.

Make sure you have the right to share materials

You must only share material in which you own copyright, or have the appropriate rights to do so.

Citation counts alone are not an indication of excellent research

Citation counts should be used with other qualitative measures.

Citation tools are limited

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:

• No tool indexes all research publications, and

• Citation metrics from different tools may vary as they index different publications.

Altmetrics

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.

More information on altmetrics, click here.