Weblearning

A profile's intent is to offer a short summary and boost your visibility. Profiles become valuable when they connect you with with potential collaborators, expand your network and increase your impact. But creating and maintaining a profile can be onerous. Some feel reluctant to put themselves out their, for fear of attracting unwanted attention, feel that these pages are an unnecessary appeal to vanity. These are fair criticisms. Many profiles are written to showcase achievements, to impress prospective employers or demonstrate credibility to the broader community. They can also be a means to make yourself more present. In this mediated world.

Putting your best foot forward 

There's no shortage of services that seek help you create short summary of you, and then share your professional and personal life. These services usually have a few common elements. A personal biography, a profile photo and usage metadata. In this section we are going to look at the raw material that goes into a Goldilocks profile.

A "Goldilocks" profile is an attempt to create a personal introduction, that does not require that much work. When it is linked to your research, you can use the profile in conjunction with your publications, articles and research data to a   larger audience, simply by linking from your profile to your research publications.  

You can choose how you want your work and scholarly self to be seen 

The hardest part about presenting yourself online is the first few steps. Most prefer to avoid focused self analysis. Before thinking about the  tools, platforms and technical capabilities necessary for the bio, make a few notes down on a piece of paper.

Below are four recommendations that can guide  you as you plan out your profile, before posting it to a profile service.

• Step 1 | Commit to a low maintenance structure
• Step 2 | Highlight your best work
• Step 3 | Connect with other researchers
• Step 4 | Present the best version of you without needing regular updates

Step 1: Commit to a low maintenance structure

When building an effective profile, its helpful to jot thoughts down in a notepad first. Remember, you are introducing yourself to the Googler, who probably has never met you, but searched for your name.  

1. Make yourself memorable with a good headline: Write  a short text blurb that can go next to your name. Think about how you would introduce yourself to someone who you don't know  This will appear in the search results. This your “Headline”. Much like a newspaper headline, this text blurb is meant to stimulate enough interest to make the reader want more. Here are some keys to writing a great headline:
1. Describe yourself with the right words: On the piece of paper, brainstorm a few keywords that are relevant to the field you’re targeting.
2. Be succinct: Never use two words when one will do.
   
2. Show your expert status: What makes you the chemical engineer/ anthropologist /computer scientist? Do you put in the most hours, score the biggest grants, or get the best instructor evaluations from students? Or is a passion for the field. Those with less experience (like recent graduates) should  show their enthusiasm for a topic. (I.e., “Computer scientist with a passion for undergraduate education.”)
   
   
3. Use a tried and true formula to writing your headline:
   3 keywords + 1 value proposition = Headline success (according to career coach Diana YK Chan.)
   So what does that look like? Taking the keywords from (1) and value proposition from step 3 above, we can create a Headline that reads, “Computer scientist with a passion for undergraduate education and experience in conceptual modeling and research management.”
   Well-written headlines are also key to making you more findable online. This is important for those of us who need disambiguation from similarly named researchers beyond ORCID.
   
4. Make yourself recognizable with the right photo: First impressions do count and a good personable headshot photo on your profile will make you more recognizable when meeting up.
   
   
5. Craft a compelling summary section: Your Summary is an opportunity to provide a 50,000-foot view into your career and studies to date. Don’t just use this section to repeat information found elsewhere on your profile. Instead, write a short narrative of your professional life and career aspirations, using some of the keywords left over from writing your Headline.
   
   Note: When writing your summary, aim to be specific and make your value clear. Don’t use technical jargon, but do provide concrete details about your research and why it matters. Make yourself a person, not just another name in a discipline. Describe what you’ve done and why it matters.

Step 2: Highlight your best work

Next, let’s continue to make a good impression by thinking of the work that’s most important to you. If this is only a simple profile, then highlight only your best work or most prestigious awards. List no more than 5 in total.

Here are the most important details to include:

• Title (this one’s a no-brainer)
• Publication URL (so others can click through to read your work)
• Description (include your abstract in this space)
• You can also add your co-authors, if they’re on LinkedIn and you’re already connected.

Step 3: Connect with other researchers

• What do you do?
• What have you done?
• Where are you now?
• What others think of you.
• What story your ten most recent collected links say about you?

Connecting with other researchers via your profile is just one more way to build an audience.  Connections also help you maintain relationships with past and current colleagues, who are likely interested in the work you’re doing and want to read about it. On some networks, it is wise to only make connections with people you actually know and feel comfortable asking to keep in touch (former collaborators, co-workers, and friends are good choices).

When connecting, remember, you are trying to build meaningful relationships, not just build a collection of followers.

Step 4  - Present the best version

With a little ingenuity you can make your profile a good place for showcasing what academics have a lot of: posters, slide decks, and figures for manuscripts.

If you’ve ever given a talk at a conference, or submitted a figure with a manuscript for publication, you can upload it here, giving viewers a better taste of your work.

You too can upload links to your best–and most visually stimulating–work for a slick-looking profile that sets you apart from others. One caveat to adding content to your profile. Profile pages do not offer analytics that show you how often your work is viewed or downloaded on the site. But that’s fine. Repositories offer this information. Profiles are more about relationships and the boost they’ll give your reputation.

Limitations

Professional visibility also come with headaches. Chief among them is that many are another information silo. (And that’s why you’re setting up a profile that’s going to be easy to maintain, so you don’t have to update it but once a year.) These profile site are also overzealous with their notification emails, sending more in a month than most of us would care to receive in a year. Luckily, they’re easy to turn off.

Done

When following the profile advice, remember who your audience and act accordingly. If you want to just show your latest publication, then this might be solved technically, where you show your work by adding an electronic business card to your e-mail with your contact information. Or if your bio is intended for a job search, to accompany a funding proposal or research publication, you might use a generic public platform. If you are writing for a public audience, your hyperlinked byline might expresses your scholarly generosity, wit, wisdom, skills and brilliance. Other profiles might be more corporate in nature, for the departmental website, a bio note for the conference platform.