This task focuses on updating your vita to make sure that it contains accurate and up-to-date information about your scholarly work. You never know when you will need an updated vita, and its always good to have the most recent version available published online in HTML or PDF format as part of your professional online presence.

In week two of the Boost Your Scholarly Profile project, you created an ORCID: a unique identification to help distinguish you from other researchers with similar names, and group your scholarly work. You will want to make sure your ORCID is included at the top of your CV, along with other personal identifying information. 

When you circulate your vita, other scholars may use it to locate specific works. Often, people may search a database or Google Scholar for the title using a phrase (quotation mark) search or by looking for specific citation information. If your information is incorrect, it makes it more difficult for your work to be located. Take a look at your vita and make sure it is completely up-to-date and error-free. Some potential things to watch out for:

• Have you updated temporary status designations of works, i.e. "in progress," "under review," and/or "in press" to reflect the current status of each item?
• Occasionally the title of an article, book, or other work may change when it is formally published in a journal, etc.  Are all your titles consistent with how they are in the actual publication? Have you eliminated any possible typographical or spelling errors?
• Does the citation for each item include correct bibliographic details, such as volume and issue numbers and the correct page numbers? 
• Are all your citations done in a consistent, disciplinary-appropriate citation style? 

What is a work identifier? A work, or persistent, identifier is a string of characters and numbers that will always lead the user to the source of the work - which can be an article, book, dataset, chapter, white paper, etc. This can be used to locate the full text of work, but it can also be used to identify where your work is being talked about or cited by others. "Altmetric" data such as Twitter or blog mentions that use persistent identifiers can then be linked, captured, and aggregated.

For an example of this, see the mash-up of data (example below) from Altmetrics.com and Public Library of Science that is possible because each PLOS article uses a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that can be captured by Altmetic.com. For more about DOIs, see DOIs, The Library and The Researcher, a one-page document from CrossRef, the major DOI provider. 

Although DOIs are the most common kind of persistent identifier, the recent NISO draft report, Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications: A Recommended Practice of the National Information Standards Organization (this is a draft document, and will be taking public comments until June 11th), identifies other kinds of persistent identifiers. Institutional repositories such as WSU's Research Exchange use a "handle" system that also functions as a persistent link.

Some citation styles, such as APA, incorporate DOIs into their citation syntax, but if your disciplinary style does not, you can append the DOI or other persistent identifier at the end of each citation.

Not every work will have a work identifier. Articles published before the development of DOIs are not always retroactively given a DOI by their creator/publisher, and because DOIs and other identifiers can have an associated fee, not all publishers pay to have them assigned. 

To locate a DOI for one citation, use CrossRef's Free DOI Lookup service. For multiple citations, you can try CrossRef's Simple Text Query Form, which allows you to paste in multiple references at once. For more information see CrossRef's Have a Citation? Get a CrossRef DOI (PDF).

For Fun:  Check out CrossRef Labs, which includes experimental tools such as FundRef Widget, an "open-source reference implementation widget for gathering FundRef data from researchers."

If you use one or more academic networking sites such as Google Scholar Profiles, Mendeley, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or LinkedIn, make sure they reflect your updated CV information. This can include any changes in your position or professional memberships, as well as your publications or creative works. Consider changing your password while you are there: recent breaches of sites such as LinkedIn are a reminder of the importance of this.