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Building your scholarly profile

A guide to developing your scholarly profile and increasing your presence online.

Portfolio/Profile

Cartoon of a book opening a file with papers floating out.

It is important to maintain a consistent “brand” across all of the platforms that you use. This can include having a professional email address, a current CV, and publications list available when someone searches for your information. The purpose of this portfolio section is to consider your body of work as a whole, rather than as a collection of pieces.

Remember, keep track of all of the areas that you choose to promote your work and consider cross listing to capture a wider audience. For instance, on a LinkedIn page you may have links to a Google Scholar page and a personal website. For more suggestions, please see the boxes below.

Scholarly Social Networking Sites

Personal Website

While maintaining a personal website may involve more work through setup and maintenance, it can provide a great opportunity for you to display your work through a more customizable platform. There a myriad of website options available, from those that offer pre-made templates to those that allow for re-design and coding of the structure (providing you an opportunity to demonstrate this high-demand skill). Free website options are available, though fees may be incurred depending on the level of customization and hosting-capacity (relating to web-traffic levels) that you get.

Personal Archives

Make sure that all of your research (articles, datasets, book chapters, etc.) is archived and accessible in a personal location, like a hard-drive and cloud storage. Try to include different versions of the same manuscript (pre-print, post-print, version of record) in one place. Know where your work is saved and make sure you have external backups so that this information remains accessible to you in the long-term. Keep your files in current formats and migrate to new memory technology, for example, from a CD to a hard drive or cloud storage. In addition to this, don't rely on long-term storage from a publisher’s website as access to this cannot always be guaranteed, especially if there is a subscription.

CV

Maintain your CV regularly so that you do not forget any of the good work that you have done. Try and schedule updates of your CV, such as every couple of months so that it becomes part of your routine.

Email address

Especially when you are applying for jobs, make sure your email address is up-to-date and professional. For instance, your personal email address may be mavericksrule@email.com, though it is important to think of the image you want associated with your name and a simple name-based email address is advisable e.g. d.jenkins@email.com.