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Scholarly Communication: Managing Your Online Presence

Measure Your Current Professional Impact

Ever wonder how you can make your research go farther? Do you think that your scholarly impact is not as big as you would like it to be?  Do you think you need help reaching a broader audience with your scholarship?  UWF Libraries can help you answer these questions and more.  Disseminating scholarly research and creating a digital identity can be a daunting task.  The librarians here at UWF have several key measures to help build and promote your scholarly imprint and boost the impact of your work.  

Before you begin completing steps that will enhance your scholarly profile, you may want to get a baseline measurement of your scholarly impact and digital identity right now.  After following certain steps to help you build your digital identity, you can repeat these steps to note the changes and improvements to the accessibility of your scholarship and the quality of your public digital identity. Throughout your career, check in on your "professional self" online, expand your reach and update areas that need attention.

Update Your CV

If you haven't updated your CV within the year, then it is time to do it! Often, we only update our CVs when applying for jobs or going up for an award or promotion. The downside of this approach is that we often forget noteworthy accomplishments over time. 

Refreshing your CV allows you to:

  • Act quickly on job positions, as well as grant & professional development opportunities.
  • Take stock of your career trajectory and identify gaps in your research, teaching, and professional experiences.
  • Re-write your CV for the positions you want or consider having multiple CVs to suit different purposes.
  • Keep an up-to-date online profile (for example, on LinkedIn or our institutional repository) so that potential collaborators may find you.
  • Highlight your most important achievements and record your most recent activities that you may forget later.

Follow the steps to keep your CV up-to-date and ready to go!

1. Update Your Personal Contact & Education Information

2. Decide on a Structure: Identify Headings and Heading Order

3. Update the Information under Each Heading 

4. Proofread for Consistency and Errors

Argo Scholar Commons - Faculty Profile

The Argo Scholar Commons (ASC) serves two purposes. It contains researcher profiles which provide information about faculty, their research, and scholarly works. And at the same time it is the online repository where a community (in this case, the University of West Florida) gathers, preserves, and showcases scholarly output produced by its members and makes these materials available to the world (copyright permitting). This output may include both publications in peer-reviewed journals and materials not published elsewhere (datasets, pre-prints, post-prints, performance recordings, syllabi, posters, theses and dissertations, book chapters, posters, videos etc). 

Unlike a personal website, we can help UWF faculty members manage their materials in a central location, in standardized formats, and in ways that allow for more effective search, retrieval, and long-term, digital preservation.

Create Your Scholarly ID

Registering with ORCID and ResearcherID will help to increase visibility for your scholarly creative activities and ensure your name is properly associated with your scholarly work.  One of the most common problems for faculty visibility is name ambiguity and the challenge of distinguishing your research with that of others.  You need to be able to easily attach your identity to your research.  Your research is of high scholarship and importance.  Registering with one or both of these scholarly-focused options is a wise option to help you stand out in the crowd.

Creating a scholarly profile is important for several reasons:

  • The same authors name could be written in different ways, or more than one researcher may have the same name
  • There may be different versions of a name, or the use of initials could be used in place of a full name
  • Some researchers could change names because of marriage or other reasons
  • Registering with ORCID and ResearcherID can help to eliminate any confusion between your work and that of a fellow researcher.

What is ORCID? from ORCID on Vimeo.

Create a Google Scholar Profile

Google (and Google Scholar) Yourself.

View how your professional profile and scholarship are seen online via the most-used search engine.

1. Google your name (hint: if you have a common name, you may want to also Google your affiliation with UWF, or any other institutions along with it).  Record the different places you appear and note which results come up first (LinkedIn, UWF website, etc). Are these sites up-to-date? What could be improved? What results do you wish would rise to the top?

2. Do the same in Google Scholar. How many citations do you have for each publication? Are your articles easy to find? Are they accessible in full-text?

3. Create a Google Scholar Citation Profile

 

Add Other Research Profiles

Academia.edu - "a platform for sharing academic research"
Linked In -  Do's and Don'ts of a Successful, High-Impact LinkedIn Profile

Research Gate - Share your research, collaborate with your peers, and get the support you need to advance your career.

Where To Share

There are many sites that allow you to upload copies of your articles (published or unpublished) in order to share your research and enhance your profile.  Keep in mind that some of these may be non-profits and others are commercial entities.  Like any other site read their information and terms closely. 

Tracking your Digital Imprint

Check Web of Science.

Web of Science is the recognized standard for citation searching. You can obtain a Researcher ID and use it to view/track publication history in ISI-listed publications, create citation reports, and calculate h-index. Web of Science indexes over 12,000 high impact journals in 250 disciplines, and includes:

  • Science Citation Index (1965 to present)
  • Social Science Citation Index (1965 to present)
  • Biological Abstracts (1969 to present)
  • Medline (1950 to present)
  • SciELO Citation Index (1997 to present)

1. Access Web of Science through the library's Databases A-Z list
2. Switch from Basic Search to Cited Reference Search or do an Advanced author search: AU=Smith, John H
3. Enter information about the cited work and click “Search”
4. Select the results you would like to view and click "Finish Search" - the results list includes all the articles citing the author and work you searched
5. Click on the title of the citing article to reveal more about the number of references the author cited, and how many times he or she has been cited