To communicate their research and teaching interests and to make their scholarly work available to others, scholars and researchers can use of a wide variety of tools, including online repositories and networking platforms. Some of these tools, like SSRN, are commercial sites run by publishers like Elsevier.
Before you post your work to commercial repositories like SSRN, Academia.edu, and others, there are a number of things to consider:
SSRN (previously known as the Social Science Research Network) is an online research forum where scholars and researchers can upload their works, find and download the works of others, and join scholarly communities. SSRN membership is free and most papers can be downloaded at no cost, subject to copyright restrictions. SSRN includes works from a wide range of disciplines, including law.
Creating an SSRN Profile
To sign in to SSRN, or to create your own SSRN account, go to www.hq.ssrn.com/login/pubsigninjoin.cfm and follow the prompts. Once you have created an account, you can update your profile information and add written works. In general, we recommend posting your unpublished or draft versions of articles to SSRN before posting the final, formatted version to Emory Law Scholarly Commons. You can also add your ORCID iD to your SSRN profile to help consolidate your scholarly record.
Emory Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series
Emory University School of Law's Legal Studies Research Paper Series within SSRN can be accessed here:
https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/emory-u-leg/. If you are an Emory University School of Law faculty member, and you would like to add a work to the Legal Studies Research Paper Series, please contact Danny Kim, Program Coordinator for Trial Techniques and Externships: daniel.kim@emory.edu.
SSRN's Terms of Use regarding and Copyright / Trade Marks
Before posting an article to SSRN, or relying on a scholarly work included in SSRN, please keep in mind their terms of use regarding copyrighted materials and trademarks. From their website (emphasis added):
When you provide material to SSRN, Elsevier asks you to confirm that doing so does not violate other parties' copyright or other proprietary rights. Accordingly, you may only post versions of academic papers or articles (“Academic Papers”), journal articles, or other content on SSRN if you have the right to do so. By way of example, while many journal publishers permit posting of some versions of Academic Papers, most journals restrict the sharing of final versions. To be sure you have the right to upload such content, you should review your publishing agreement, the publisher’s copyright policies, and/or any other applicable information prior to posting any version of an Academic Paper. You may post your paper to SSRN only if you are the copyright owner, have the copyright owner’s permission, are permitted to do so under your publishing agreement or the publisher’s copyright policies or your institution’s license agreement or under a Creative Commons license.
There are a number of options available for you to make your work, your accomplishments, and your research interests available to others beyond SSRN and your ORCID profile page. At the same time, such tools also require monitoring and updating to ensure that the information posted is complete and current, so selecting just a couple of options can be a good solution.
HeinOnline Author Profiles
HeinOnline generates author profile pages automatically for faculty at Emory Law whose scholarship is available through HeinOnline's Law Journal Library. These profiles can be linked to your ORCID iD and social media platforms, and HeinOnline profile pages provide you with ScholarRank Metrics.
Google Scholar Profiles
A Google Scholar Profile offers a way for researchers and scholars to showcase their publications. By creating a profile, you will be able to check how many people have cited your works, you can track citation metrics, and you can make your profile publicly available for others to find when they conduct a Google Scholar search.
To create a Google Scholar Profile, you will need to sign in to your Google account; if you do not yet have a Google account, you will need to create one. Next, fill out the Google Scholar Profile sign up form here.
You can add information about books, articles, and other works you've written to your profile. If you need to add missing articles, you can either "Add articles" by searching for them and then adding them to your profile once the search pulls them up, or you can "Add article manually" by typing in the title, authors, etc. If you need to remove articles from your profile that were incorrectly attributed to you, you can select those articles and "Delete" them.
In order for your Profile to be included in Google Scholar search results, you will need to make your profile public, and you will need to verify your Emory University email address.
Academia.edu, like ResearchGate and other some other tools, is a commercial profile site that you can join free of charge. Membership with Academia.edu can provide you with access to works written by other scholars, and it is another way to make your own works findable.
Some scholars have complained that their works were removed without notice from Academia.edu and that Academia.edu regularly sends messages encouraging scholars to upgrade their accounts for a fee. Academia.edu also requires people to have an account in order to access works in Academia.edu, so your works may be more difficult for people to find and download than, for example, works that are in Emory Law Scholarly Commons.
ResearchGate allows you to share your research and measure your impact through a free account. It also allows you to track readers and citations. You can also use ResearchGate to follow other researchers or particular subjects that interest you.
Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed works run by Elsevier. Researchers can set up a free author profile and view metrics through the Scopus website. To see if you already have an author profile, you can run a search in Scopus, using your name, or your ORCID iD. Your account will include a Scopus Author Identifier, which is a unique number that matches authorship to documents. If you have an ORCID iD, you can "Connect [your Scopus author profile] to ORCID" -- this option will be at the top of the author profile page next to the green ORCID logo. A Scopus author profile page will include number of citations, number of documents, h-index score, and document and citation trends for that author. Additional features are available to you through Emory University; if you "Check Scopus access" on the Scopus landing page, you can enter "Emory University" to see the additional features available to you.
