Library:Building Your Academic Profile/Create a Profile
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.
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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 Academia.edu allows you to update your status, upload your academic papers (including unpublished drafts), list your research interests and follow other scholars with similar areas of research.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.
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.
- Read more about ORCID - Use cases and views on the future of ORCID in UK Higher Education
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.
Profile Promotion
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.
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.