Professional profiles are online spaces where you can collect, curate, disseminate, and/or discuss your work.
Why Create a Professional Profile?
There are lots of reasons to create professional profiles as you begin your academic career. Here are a few:
Networking: Professional profiles allow you to create connections with researchers beyond your immediate institution or your advisor's connections. You can discuss work, share research, and create a community that will help your research thrive.
Research Impact: There are many metrics you can use to assess your research impact, and these metrics become increasingly important if you go through the tenure and promotion process. Creating profiles on sites like Google Scholar or Web of Science can set you up for success and let you start collecting citation counts and other metrics early.
Search Engine Optimization: Want to make you (and your research) findable? Create professional profiles. Profiles from Google Scholar, LinkedIn, or ResearchGate are often one of the first results that appear when people search your name, so make sure that what they find is up-to-date and helpful.
Trend Tracking: Professional profiles allow you to join communities of researchers and know and react more quickly to the newest research. You can also both receive and provide feedback on research-in-progress, which will save you editing and revising time later.
Best Practices for Creating Professional Profiles
Here are some best practices for creating professional profiles:
Start early and update often. It can be hard to maintain a dozen different profiles, so pick a few that you know will be relevant to your field and set aside time to maintain and update them as needed. It can help to create a stable headline or short summary of who you are and where your research is going--this summary will follow you and won't need to be updated often.
Don't just create; participate! Professional profiles aren't supposed to sit idle. Instead, use them as a springboard to connect and share your research broadly. You can also promote works from your colleagues, advisor, or institution.
Connect everything. Make sure that if a potential collaborator or interested person finds one of your profiles, they can find all the information you want to share. You can do this by adding links to each profile and letting people know your preferred mode of contact. Some professional profiles, like ORCiD, also give you a stable, persistent way to keep your research together even if you change names or institutions.
Be mindful of copyright (and privacy). Before adding your papers or works to your profile, make sure you are within copyright. You can always ask a librarian to help determine what version of an article, if any, you are allowed to post. Keep in mind that some professional profiles, including ResearchGate and Academia.edu, collect your data with or without your permission.
Remember your audience. Professional profiles are not the same as your normal social media profiles. You may need to create separate accounts (especially on sites like X/Twitter) to keep your professional and personal life separate. Start with a professional photo, whether a headshot or "action photo" of you giving a presentation or working in a lab. Then, make sure your updates, summaries, and interactions are professional and clear.
