The importance of a scholar’s reputation has impacts far beyond their work. But enhancing and growing that reputation is a career-long process made even more complicated and complex with the impact of the Digital Era on academics.

In order for someone to be truly recognized as impactful, they have to have a digital presence with a good reputation. Many academics start this process early by creating a scholarly profile for themselves. This is their way to get their work out to anyone who sees their profile and allows networking between academic experts and potential collaborators, funders, and other scholars in interdisciplinary and similar fields.

What Does a Scholarly Profile Consist Of?

A scholarly profile is also known as an academic profile. This is an online, digital presence created by you to put together a narrative of your career as a scholar and what your goals are. It’s intended to tell others, including potential funding organizations, about your abilities, skills, characteristics, and previous work, as well as your intent for research and learning in the future.

It’s almost like a short curriculum vitae, highlighting your previous works, what you know how to do well, and what you plan on doing with the rest of your career and the avenues you hope to take to get there.

Inside the scholarly profile, you should list your various educational and instructional experiences, any publications you have under your belt, places you’ve spent teaching at, and any professional relationships you have that would be pertinent to allowing others to see a clearer picture of you.

The Benefits of a Good Scholarly Profile

In the 21st century, people are going to be searching your reputation online and gauging an idea of you before they even talk to you yourself. It may not be something you agree with, but it’s the reality of life with billions of people accessing the internet regularly for their information. To this end, you’re going to have a digital presence regardless. It’s best if you take control of it yourself by building a scholarly profile you know is reputable.

When you organize your academic profile and make it publicly accessible, there are many benefits you might find come along with it, such as:

●      You may receive opportunities to connect with other scholars and exchange knowledge

●      You may be asked to collaborate with other scholars on research you wouldn’t have had access to otherwise

●      Other community members may be interested in reading and citing your work, increasing your citation impact and scholarly reputation

●      It’s a place where you can store a full collection of your work and links to it for others to access and cite

●      Placing your experience and interests in a publicly accessed, professional forum is a great way to promote and market yourself as a researcher with a solid reputation, giving you a better chance at coveted promotions, positions, and tenure

The more involved you are at building your scholarly profile, the better the opportunities that arise from it may be.

Ways to Enhance Your Profile’s Scholastic Impact

The first step in creating a scholastic profile is to choose the platform you want to focus on. You can use multiple public accounts, but one of the most frequently accessed professionally in research is Google Scholar.

Create your account and ensure that all your contact information is professional - leave out your personal contact info - and updated. Return here any time you have a change, such as a new email address or a change in your job.

Make sure you include all of your affiliation information and take the time to choose keywords that relate to your research because these will be mined by web crawlers when someone queries terms that could bring them to your page.

Personalize your profile with a professional photo. People are more likely to see you as a legitimate resource if you have a photo on your site.

Include all of your publications and links to them. With Google Scholar, you may be asked to choose the correct ones based on how they show up online. Double check any that look like yours and make sure they’re actually from you and not something similar that another author used. You can leave out things like book reviews or newsletters if you think there is too much content on your profile.

It may be something you’re cautious about, but go ahead and make your profile public. As long as you have only added professional contact information and data, you don’t have to worry about personal information being obtained by the wrong person. With a public profile, others can find your work and learn about you so that you can be open to those opportunities and benefits that come with having a reputable scholarly profile.

Impactio Can Help You Promote Your Research

Scholarly profiles are a form of self-promotion, but there are others you can use, too. Many of the steps that could become obstacles to scholars who aren’t sure what to do to promote their work are easily overcome when you use the right program. Impactio, designed for academic experts, is an all-in-one platform that allows you to develop professional submissions to use to promote your research as impactful.

Through Impactio’s software, you choose how you want to present your work. The predesigned text, graph, and web page templates let you take your work into the world. You get your own academic profile with Impactio, too, so the community of researchers who already use Impactio can find you. Share your Impacito profile with your Google Scholar account and social media followers, or turn it into a professional PDF document to present to your in-person audience. When it comes to promoting your research to its maximum capability, Impactio has what you need to get the job done.