This afternoon one of those serendipitous conversations happened that allowed me to add another online profile to my digital presence; Google Scholar now offer individual academic profiles that update automatically, can be edited and keep track of an individual’s publications, and their collaborations. It took about 15 minutes to set up my profile and that included finding a new image to go on the web – my Harris garden photo is now about 8 years old – how good to stay looking young 🙂

A single profile from Google Scholar Citations

Other colleagues on Google Scholar Citations include Jim Dunwell who introduced me to the system, and Liam Mc Guffin who works in an area with very highly cited papers. I’m pleased to see Pat Parslow but surprised Shirley Williams is not there – I’ve finally beaten our super-techie to a new platform 🙂 [not for long! Shirley now has a profile. I love the photo – bringing glamour back in to science :-)].

Google Scholar Profiles even tracks down and links to publicly available copies of the publications.  It seems to me that much of the work done in our Centaur system is provided here without the need for a local infrastructure to support it.