Your Path to Maintaining a Professional Online Presence
February 21, 2018
Your smartphone can recognize your face, the Pope is on Twitter and cars are learning to drive themselves – we are living in the future. It’s more essential than ever to know how to navigate the online world, especially when it comes to your professional identity. Dylan Burns, a specialist from University Libraries, shares tips on how to best present yourself online.
There are many platforms that you can use to maintain a scholarly online presence. Websites like Researchgate, Academia.edu and Selected Works are just a few that grad students and researchers across the country use to keep track of their published works and research. In this month’s GrTS, Dylan Burns, the USU Digital Scholarship Librarian, discusses the different platforms and how to best utilize them to craft a scholarly online presence.
When looking at creating a profile, it’s important to consider all the factors. Some sites have issues with copyright and accessibility. Some considerations to make when choosing a platform include the popularity and stability of the platform, whether the platform is profit or non-profit, the accessibility and indexability of the information, and how copyright and ownership of materials are handled. Dylan discusses the details of all the points and how to choose the best platform for you.
Researchgate is popular among the sciences. While there are millions of uploads, many have been posted illegally.
Acedemia.org is more popular with humanities but has the same issues as Researchgate. In addition, the site switched to a premium model and many of the features no longer work without payment.
Selected Works is the database in association with USU’s DigitalCommons. The platform is provided by the USU Library, but everything is completely personalized and stays in your control. Everything is also vetted for copyright before upload.
Google Scholar is another tool you can use when fine-tuning your online presence. You can utilize their profiling system so that when people look you or your work up, the information that comes up is actually correct.
Finally, Dylan talks about ORCiD – an identifying number that allows you to claim your research as your own. This number can be used for journals and be put on a CV. Many publications now require an ORCiD number to publish with them. Dylan walked through the setup of an ORCiD and Scorpus profile (an abstract and citation database).