Library:Building Your Academic Profile

The scholarly information life cycle has traditionally focused on the published article or book as the key output of the process but with the growth of social media and networked technologies the cycle has expanded the reach of a scholar's ideas in new and interactive ways. This guide focuses on skills and tools for discussing, interacting, presenting, writing, commenting, and finally publishing your research in the "new" scholarly communication environment.

Workshops and Guides

There are additional guides that will help you in your profile development and publication process, explore following guides or attend a workshop.

Additional Resources

To keep informed of new tools and techniques emerging in social networked technologies and academic profile building, review the following:

Profile Building

Building your academic profile online can help demonstrate your authority, expertise and research interests. The internet has become the starting point for all searches, so you want to make sure that people are finding authorized biographical and contact information about you. This is especially important when you're starting your academic career. Chances are that your department has a profile page about you, but these may be updated infrequently and buried on university websites. There are a number of social networking sites that you can use to take direct control of your scholarly profile.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site with a focus on job recruiting. However, it's not all business. Many scholars use LinkedIn to show off their academic service. If you're investigating a non-traditional career, or even if you just want to ensure discovery of your CV by university administrators and support staff, LinkedIn can be an important complement to your other social networking activities. Even if you don't use it regularly, make sure you update big career events such as teaching posts, fellowships and grants.

UBC Company Page

Nice profile by UBC grad Olivier Riche showing Research Interests, Resume, links to cIRcle, requires account to view

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is a Facebook-like social networking platform for scholars. It allows people to search by name, research interests and universities. The site is highly visited and prominent in Google searches. Academia.edu allows you to update your status, upload your academic papers (including unpublished drafts), list your research interests and follow other scholars with similar areas of research. This site also provides great assessment tools that allow you to be notified when someone views your profile or papers.

List of UBC Department profiles

Sample Profile of Former UBC Post-Doc in Asian Studies

Sample of Research Interest Result: Bertrand Russell

ResearchGate

With more than 6 million researchers, ResearchGate is the leading social networking site for scientists and an increasing number of scholars in humanities and social sciences. It offers the same functionality as Academia.edu: share publications, get statistics about views and downloads of your research; collaborate with peers, etc.

List of UBC Department profiles

UBC Department of Chemistry

Sample profile of UBC Psychology professor, Anita DeLongis

Mendeley

Mendeley is a social reference management site. You may already be using it to store your citations and help keep track of your research, but it also has some great social features. You can list or upload your research publications, provide a brief academic CV, biographical information, and participate in a group. Mendeley groups allow you to share and discover new research in your field.

UBC Research Tag

Sample UBC PhD Student Profile

Sample UBC eHealth Group Page

Scholarly Identifiers

ORCID - (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)

ORCID provides a "persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher". Register for free, then associate your publications with your ORCID. Once you've populated your ORCID, use the persistent URL as a link to a list of your publications. Going forward, include your ORCID when you submit journal articles, grant applications, etc. ORCID is required by a growing number of agencies and publishers, including Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Public Library of Science, and Thomson Reuters.

ResearcherID

ResearcherID operates in Web of Science, offering a unique scholar identifier within Web of Science, citation metrics and a scholar profile page with citation metrics for each account. Register for free and add your publications to your ResearcherID account.

ResearcherID and ORCID are complementary systems, and you can quickly exchange data between your ResearcherID and your ORCID. Step by step instructions are available in print and on this short video.

Google Scholar Profile

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it appears at the top of Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

Richard Feynman, California Institute of Technology

Profile Promotion

Twitter

The microblogging platform Twitter needs no introduction, but have you considered how you can use it to network in your academic community? You can use hashtags to discover important news in your discipline or other active scholars. It can also help them to discover you so that you're engaging with your larger academic community instead of just people who know you or stumble across your profile. It is increasingly common for conferences to have an associated hashtag so make sure to check if there is one when you attend your next meeting. Live-tweeting conferences is a great academic service for those who can't attend, and it's another way to build your profile to display authority in your field.

Sample hashtag for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting

Share your Twitter top tips for a new ‘how-to’ guide for academics on the merits of academic tweeting

A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic

Top-Twitter-Tips-for-Academics Top Twitter Tips for Academics

List of Academic Twitter Accounts

Bibliography of Research on Twitter & Microblogging

About.me

Creating a personal landing page using About.me allows you to gather together all your various online networks into one place without creating a personal website. About.me lets you upload a picture, write a brief biography, and list websites where you have an active presence. It can be a great way to let people explore your digital presence online and to help direct them from sites where you may have a token presence to other sites where you are far more active.

Sample UBC Profile

Sample UBC Department Profile

Gravatar

Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. Setting up your Gravatar is as easy as uploading a single photo. Once you've done this, many websites and blogs (e.g. WordPress) will use your Gravatar whenever you leave a comment. This is a one-step action that can definitely help you become more visually recognized across the blogosphere. Just make sure you choose a professional photo and not a cartoon drawing.

Be a Content Developer

Developing online scholarly content can often be a daunting task. With the proliferation of social technologies and the pressure to engage in traditional scholarly output, it becomes a question of how to keep up in an ever-changing environment that may not have the impact needed to be considered academically rigorous. While keeping up with technologies is a complicated process, developing scholarly content for the internet can be as simple as posting drafts of articles, commenting on recent scholarship, or uploading previous conference presentations.

Blogs

Blogs are a space where academics and scholars engaged in new ideas, begin discussions on research findings, and gain feedback on pre-published materials. Blogging gives academics the opportunity to expand the reach of their scholarship by presenting their work to a larger community. This builds opportunities for collaboration and potentially new publishing outputs. Additionally, blogging of research can provide academics with open discussion about their research, a form of interactive peer review that moves beyond the closed models currently supported in traditional publishing models

UBC offers a weblogging platform run on the open-source software Wordpress. Managed through the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTLT), UBC blogs can be created for courses, portfolios, research and publishing. To learn more about developing your own UBC blog, read the documentation developed by CTLT or attend a workshop.

Additional blogging platforms can be found at Best Blogging Platforms.

Examples of Blogs Used for Subject Engagement

RRR Research Blog @ UBC Biology

Gradhacker

Feministing: The Scholarly Feminist

Examples of Blogs Used for Peer Review

Archaeologist posting draft of dissertation chapter on blog

Giving It Away: Sharing the Future of Scholarly Communication

Learning About Copyright Permissions

SHERPA RoMEO - This site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

For authors' rights and copyright guidance, make an appointment with the UBC Library Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office.

Videos and Podcasts

A great deal of scholarly output is often difficult to capture. Lectures and conference presentations, while important modes of scholarly output, are not captured as effectively with written notes and presentation documents. Videos and podcasts allow you to capture:

presentations that may be dependent on audiovisual materials for expressing ideas
discussion periods that can add clarity to your work
nonverbal skills associated to effective presentation

Additionally, videos and podcasts can add to your instruction portfolio. You can develop instruction material in multiple formats and use the material as support for your own instruction and/or provide open access to a broader community. Open Education Resources (OER) are a good example of this kind of work.

Examples of Academic Videos

Knowledge Centre Tête-à-Tête Series

Academic Earth

UBC YouTube Channel

Examples of Academic Podcasting

Centre for Women's and Gender Studies Podcast Series

Open Culture - Podcast Lists

Presentations

Have you given a presentation at a conference or colloquium that you're exceptionally proud of? Chances are that you also spent a good amount of time making professional slides. Archiving your slides online can give people early glimpses into your research. It can also help maintain your active research presence after the presentation and build interest in your future publications. Get the most out of your slides!

Slideshare; Example UBC Journalism Professor Alfred Hermida

Digital Repositories

Have you completed original research for a graduate seminar or course? Consider archiving your paper in cIRcle, UBC's institutional repository. You're probably familiar with cIRcle because archiving your thesis or dissertation there is mandatory, but they also accept graduate papers with approval from your course instructor or supervisor. Check out their getting started guide for students.

If you've published an article in your field, you may also want to explore archiving in a subject repository. This varies from discipline to discipline and also depends on the post-publication rights in your author agreement. Ask your subject liaison librarian for help identifying repositories in your area of research.

e.g. EconPapers; Example: UBC Economics professor Mauricio Drelichman

Open Education Resources

Open educational resources (OERs) are freely accessible and openly licensed resources that are useful for teaching, learning, and research. They can include, but are not limited to, syllabi, reading lists, handouts and course readings, PowerPoint slides, and even videos. You can leverage all the time you spend teaching by publishing your teaching materials online for others to use in their own instruction. If you've spent a lot of time developing a new course, sharing the resources openly can help you get more credit for your work. For more information on OER, visit CTLT's resource page.

UBC Examples

e.g. Arts One Arts One Digital Open, online extension or complement to Arts One that enables anyone to join this voyage of discovery and critical analysis.

e.g. SPAN 312 Murder Madness and Mayhem wiki

e.g. Phylo: Biology Trading Card Game by David Ng

OER Repositories

OER Commons

Open Culture

Content Curation

We are presented with a sea of information every day and sometimes the greatest service is to help sort it all in a meaningful way. Content curation takes many forms but usually starts when an interested individual takes it upon themself to help others find related materials. Some ideas for content curation include:

Twitter lists

Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content

Life Science Hashtags Google spreadsheet

Bibliographies e.g. Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites

Open Bibliographies using Zotero or Mendeley

e.g.Ancient World Open Bibliographies plus related blog Ancient World Open Bibliographies

Creating an authority page using a Wiki

e.g. List of Official UBC Twitter Accounts

Become a Player

Even collaborative research projects can be isolating, so it's important to take the time to meet and communicate with others in your field. Attending conferences and webinars can be a good way of interacting with scholars outside of your colleagues and classmates.

Community Engagement

Subject Listservs

Many subjects still depend on subject listservs to circulate important news, ask informal research questions, and even notify users about upcoming webinars, conferences, and job postings. Subject-based listservs can be an extremely invaluable way to engage with researchers in your specific area of research. Ask your graduate advisor or subject liaison librarian if there is an important listserv for your area of research.

e.g. H-net has many subject listservs for Humanities scholars

Call for Papers

A "Call for Papers" is a method used by publishers to collect articles, conference presentations, and book chapters for potential publication. The call will specify whether you should submit an abstract or a full article/paper/chapter which will then be reviewed for publication. Calls for papers come from a variety of sources, including publisher and association websites, in addition to the resources listed below.

Humanities and Social Sciences Net - Online

An international consortium of scholars and teachers, H-Net creates and coordinates Internet networks with the common objective of advancing teaching and research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

WikiCFP

Search thousands of Calls For Papers in science and technology fields.

Twitter

Conference organizers use Twitter to promote their events and to solicit presentations - especially if submission deadlines are extended. For some examples, see #callforpapers.

Professional Associations

If you want to stay current with affairs in your field of study, you may want to join a professional association. Academic associations come together to organize ethics and standards in a field of research and lobby governmental bodies on behalf of their members. Membership often has privileges including job notice services, e-mail listservs, training, conferences, and sometimes even funding and scholarships. It is common practice to list membership in professional associations on your academic CV. Many offer deeply discounted membership rates for graduate students. If you want to find professional associations in your area of study, ask your academic advisor or consult one of the library research guides.

Webinars

The internet has made it easy to participate in scholarly activities in our discipline that formerly required a lot of money and travel. Professional associations and groups now often stream training sessions online to reach more users. Webinars can be free, restricted to members of association, or even cost money. The best way to discover webinars in your area is to join a professional association.

Conferences

Attending and presenting at conferences is important for networking with the larger academic community. For many young scholars, speaking at a conference can be an informal way to get some feedback about your research prior to publication. Make sure to bring a pen to write down ideas that come up after your presentation.

Conferences have proliferated in the last two decades, so it is important to think about attending conferences that will maximize your own investment. Some factors to consider include:

Will attendance be widespread at the provincial, national or disciplinary level?
For small conferences, is the subject directly related to my research providing networking with high-profile experts?
Will the conference proceedings be published? This can be an excellent first publication for a new academic

It is important to know the differences that exist between conference proceedings and journal articles. The most important considerations should be that conferences proceedings are rarely peer-reviewed and that journals rarely want to publish material that's been published elsewhere.

Services for Conference Discovery

Conference Alerts

Peer Review

Traditional opportunities for peer review will come from your own publishing and collaborating with faculty, as well as through direct contact with editors and editorial boards. Some peer review opportunities can come through engaging in the development and support of graduate student journals (e.g. Graduate Student Journal of Psychology or Journal of Integrated Studies). Additionally, journal editorial boards may develop student editor positions (e.g. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology).

New forms of peer review that involve publication of research prior to completing the final manuscript are becoming more viable. This opens the door to new forms of peer review opportunities for emerging scholars and the public. Online commenting has become a form of peer review for scholars, however online spaces are emerging for scholars to share their pre-published work with peers within the field.

Wordpress Plugins for Open Peer Review

Pressbooks

A WordPress plugin for simple book publishing. This tool makes it easy for authors and editorial teams to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs right within the blogging platform. It generates ePub, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and HTML.

Anthologize

A WordPress plugin that allows you to use the blogging platform to create, edit and publish a book. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

Commentpress

Commentpress is an open source theme and plugin for WordPress that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. Commentpress is used for History Working Papers.

Examples of Pre and Post Open Peer Review

History Working Papers

HWPP is an online space for scholars to share works-in-progress with their peers. After uploading a conference paper, essay, or article manuscript to the HWPP website, authors can invite others to read their work and make comments in the margins. As more people respond, writers get more feedback. But, unlike traditional comments done on paper, HWPP allows commenters and authors to interact with each other. They can read each other’s marginalia and engage in dialogue about it. In fact, entire threaded discussions can take place in the margins.