Here's how to create a Google Scholar profile. At the end of this process you will have a URL that points to all (or most) of your publications.
Prerequisite: Log into Google
Go to http://scholar.google.com and sign in with your Google account. If you are signed in you will see your Google username at the upper right; if not you will see the words "Sign in".
Prerequisite: Go to Google Scholar
Once you are at http://scholar.google.com you can click on the My Citations link.
Once you click My Citations Google will step you through a series of screens to create your profile and populate it with citations.
Step 1: Profile Information
Fill in the four fields. Be sure to give a middle initial in the Name field so that Google can do a better job finding your publications.
As your email address, use your iastate.edu address to show Google that you really are at an educational institution. Google will send an email to this address and you will need to click a link in the email to prove that you really are in the ivory tower.
Step 2: Find Your Publications
In this step, you are building a list of your publications.
Based on the name you entered, Google will present a list of publications it has found that it thinks are yours. It is surprisingly good at this. But if your name has variations (Ken vs Kenneth) you can do additional searches to add to the group of articles that Google has found:
To look at all of the articles Google has found, click the See all articles link. You can uncheck any articles that are not actually yours but are written by your evil twin with a similar name.
Continue to search articles and add them to your list of articles by using the Add selected articles button. When you are satisfied, go back to the list so you can complete the final steps of making your profile.
Step 3: Choose Update Method
Google offers to automatically search for and find new articles that you publish as you publish them. That way they will be automatically added to your publications list. If you have a fairly unique name, this is probably a good idea because Google will do the work for you. But if your name is John Smith, there is a good chance that Google will find articles published by some other John Smith.
Step 4: Make Your Profile Public
Your profile needs to be public so that others can see it and so that we can pull the publication list into our website. Make it public by clicking the "Make my profile public" link.
Step 5: Copy Your Google Scholar URL
When you have completed the above steps and are looking at your brand new Google Scholar profile, you can find the URL to your Google Scholar profile by clicking the word Link and viewing the Public URL that is then shown.
If you are creating a profile on one of our websites this is the information that you would enter into the Websites section of the profile form.
Congratulations! You've created a Google Scholar profile. Thanks to Ken Holscher for allowing us to take screenshots as he went through the process.