ILRI’s communications and KM group has put in place many institutional mechanisms and tools to make ILRI research visible on the Internet and beyond (CGSpace for example).

Increasingly, individual authors and scientists can do a lot more of this themselves. Here are 5 things you can do to make your ILRI work more visible (it also helps your career!)

1. The first is ORCID (http://orcid.org/about/what-is-orcid). Just as each journal article has a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI), ORCID gives each researcher a unique identifier. This is increasingly being demanded by research funders. Register for an ORCID ID at: https://orcid.org/register. Once you are registered, ORCID helps you identify your personal list of publications, querying mainstream databases like SCOPUS (it links using your SCOPUS author id). See for example Alan Duncan: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3954-3067

2. The second is Google Scholar Citations (https://scholar.google.com/citations). As well as helping you list all your publications, this Google service provides your ‘h-index’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) based on the citations of the publications listed. See this nice guide from Swansea University. Make sure to set this up when you are logged in with your personal Google account.  TIPS: Include ‘ILRI’ as an acronym in your position description; and add ‘livestock’ as one of your ‘areas of interest’. See for example Steve Staal: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iSNEPBIAAAAJ&hl=en

3. The third is Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com/). Mendeley is more focused on collaboration and networking but also helps you track your publications, creating groups where teams can collectively build knowledge bases. See for example Tezira Lore: https://www.mendeley.com/profiles/tezira-lore/

4. The fourth is ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/). Similar to Mendeley, researchgate helps you share and find research. See for example Zelalem Lema: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zelalem_Lema/. Important is to select the correct institution. You should use ‘Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’ and the ‘department’ called ‘International Livestock Research Institute’

5. The fifth is the staff profile on the ILRI web site (https://www.ilri.org/user – login with your usual CGIAR address and password). Here we have a profile of all staff. Just like the other services you need to update this yourself. Choosing the right departments and units makes sure you appear on the correct pages of our web site. Under the tab ‘my web address’ you can also make sure your profile links to each of these services. We need you to please update your profiles as we use these when visitors come, they sit behind our web site pages, and we can use the profiles above t add value to services like CGSpace – the next version (September) will include embedded metrics and links and impact information on you and the work you publish. We NEED your help, to help yourself and ILRI.

These services all help you share your research; they also help you connect and collaborate. They all provide interesting statistics and rankings of your work – some of which are VERY important in future CGIAR assessments. Some also provide job postings.

Of course, these are a few ways you can promote your work. We also strongly encourage you to share updates and announcements and links on Yammer – the CGIAR’s facebook. You probably have linkedin and facebook accounts – please look for and join or follow the ILRI groups and pages.

And finally, there’s Twitter. This grows in importance in our research, agriculture and development world. Joining twitter gives you a(nother) way to follow all sorts of conversations. It’s easy to join and post and share updates. Increasingly, entire conversations are only on Twitter (USAID Agrilinks project).

For these social tools, you can ask for help from any of ILRI’s communications and KM people, especially: In Nairobi: Susan , Paul, Muthoni, Ben, Tezira, Ethel, Dorine. In Addis: Tsehay, Liya, Ewen, James, Simret. And of course Brian, Jules and Mercy in Kampala, Los Banos and Dar es Salaam.

Don’t forget you can get ILRI’s internal announcements in your mail box: click http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=ilriannouncements , enter your email address and the security code, then confirm the subsequent email from Feedburner.