Easy resources researchers can use to promote a better online presence
Posted on February 13, 2022
Building an online presence can sound all very daunting, and you may think this means that you need to write a website, and start blogging, do social media, and spend lots of time on your digital persona. You do not. As scientists, we are lucky that there are a number of existing platforms that help us present the information I described (in the last post) as part of a digital introduction. I will outline the resources I feel are the most useful. They might require some effort to set-up but once created they are painless to maintain. All services are free.
The platforms, at a glance, are:
Your organization’s website
This is the best place to give a general introduction. Most research organizations have a website where they automatically generate a “staff page” about you. The information here is considered reputable by any person reading them because the information is backed by a large organisation. For that reason, you will find that these pages tend to be the first result on search engines. The problem is that because these are automatically generated they are usually quite sparse, with only your name, position and email listed. You should expand this information with a short biography about yourself, your research interests, a professional picture and a contact method. You can usually have links to other websites like your social media accounts, portfolio of your publications and so on. Your organization has spent a lot of time developing the website and building their “brand”, why not leverage this for yourself?
These pages, however, can be tricky to modify. You as a staff or student probably do not have the power to just change the content and often you will need to send the desired text to someone for it to be updated. On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about formatting the website yourself.
Google scholar
If you have at least one publication or preprint, Google Scholar is your next port of call. It provides a clean and sleek website with a list of all your publications with links to all the sources. It also includes useful options like exporting citations. You can also make minor corrections, like merging identical publications and preprints into one entry. The signup is very easy and you do not have to add publications to it yourself as it crawls all the information from elsewhere. I have noticed that when people create a Google Scholar profile, their profile will rank highly in the Google search results. Having a Google Scholar profile is not an annoyance and the service rarely emails me. I often use someone’s Google Scholar profile to understand what they work on just by skimming the abstracts and titles.
ORCiD.org
ORCiD.org is an online service that provides a unique identifier for authors of scientific articles. This helps detangle issues where author’s names are not unique. It is similar to Google scholar as it catalogues all your publications but you can add extra information like your education, work history, awards/funding, and peer review contributions. It works like a short CV, and it is useful to link to in your staff profile as I mentioned above or in your email signature. Like Google Scholar it automatically updates your publication history so it is not difficult to keep up to date.
Most journals allow you to specify an ORCiD when you submit a manuscript to them, and they provide a link to the ORCiD profile on the website for the paper. This allows people to see you as an author and click through to your portfolio. Some publishing groups have made providing ORCiD a mandatory part of their submission process.
In my field of microbial bioinformatics, twitter is the social media of choice. Tweets from users are usually public so this allows conversations between researchers who may not have an opportunity to interact elsewhere. You can have people with a shared interest come together with minimal effort, like using a hashtag for a conference. You can promote research and ideas, job opportunities, and memes as you like. It is not widely adopted across all scientific fields, so check with colleagues if they use Twitter.
Publons.com
Publons fills out the trifecta of online portfolios. Again, this catalogues your publications like Google Scholar and ORCiD but this provides two major benefits that the other two do not. Firstly, this site is linked to Web of Science, a database of scientific literature and analytics. The people behind Web of Science are the ones who calculate a journal’s Impact Factor. Having this account allows you to make minor changes to your publication record, like if you’ve published under slightly different names and want to link them all together. The second benefit is that you can input your peer-review activities here. If you link your ORCiD here, then this information will be synchronized across both sites.
Personal website
These are websites entirely maintained by yourself. These days they seem to get ranked poorly on search engines and require significant effort to create and maintain. This is the last thing to consider after you’re comfortable with the resources above. Here you can put any content you like and the presentation will depend on how you want to present yourself. I will leave that to you. If you are looking for a platform to use, Wordpress is probably the easiest to get started. I suggest the section below on what to do if you have no publications if you are looking for ideas for content beyond an online CV.
What to do if you have no publications
Publications are our main currency in research. It is a good way to show your interests and what you are capable of doing, aside from communicating scientific knowledge. I admit that most of my suggestions so far expect you to have some publications to show, but there are still options for you even if you do not have any publications (yet).
You can publish your slides from presentations or posters online via services like figshare. Or you can create some blog content about something you are working on. It can be something non controversial like talking about a particular method. If you have an interesting protocol you’ve created, you can publish it on protocols.io. Protocols.io submissions are indexed on your ORCiD. If you’ve written a programming script, you can put it up on github or similar. Perhaps your project is sensitive and you can’t actually talk about it at all. In that case, you may want to try writing short reviews of publications you’ve read.
What is important here is to create something visible so people can see what you are all about. I would be careful not to release anything blantly wrong but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
These options can be linked on the “staff profile” or on a personal website. In anything I’ve suggested, you should check with your supervisor or organisation if they are happy with you releasing it online.
If you want to hear more about this with different points of view, we talk about this on the microbinfie podcast in episode 66 - scholarly communications for bioinformaticians
Questions or comments? @ me on Twitter @happy_khan
The banner image is an AI generated picture (Midjourney) with prompt; 'scholarship'. You can share and adapt this image following a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence