What is Publons?
Publons is a Web service that allows you to track your publications, citations, and contributed peer reviews in one dashboard. Publons also calculates your h-index (the productivity/impact indicator calculated using the number of articles and number of citations to those articles) and displays all data on a public-facing dashboard.
Originally launched as a service to track completed peer reviews, Publons was recently purchased by Clarivate, the group that owns Web of Science, and has added integrations with published citation data using the Web of Science ResearcherID and ORCID.
What does this mean for researchers?
If you have a ResearcherID or ORCID, it's easy to create a dashboard that shows a fairly complete picture of your productivity that not only lists publications, but also citation counts, visualizations, and other measures. Researchers can export their record for funding or promotion applications.
Adding entries for the peer reviews and journal editing work adds important contributions to an individual's research impact that are not currently available elsewhere.
Publons also offers an online course in completing peer reviews called Publons Academy. For researchers new to writing peer reviews, this may be a helpful feature.
How do you use Publons?
Users must create their own account and then add any ORCID or ResearcherID profiles to populate their publications. To add a peer review, you must add the journal name and date, then send the email acknowledgement to verify the work. The text of the peer review can be added, but does not have to be included.
How does this relate to similar sites?
- Mendeley is the most similar product in terms of publication impact, but also includes features that allow researchers to save citations by others for manuscripts and research projects.
- Scopus and Web of Science, both citation databases, allow you to calculate research impact based on a group of publications, including those by an individual.
- Scholars@Duke offers the ability to display a bibliography of Duke faculty member's own work on their Scholars profile pages.