Are you a junior researcher, incoming grad student, or just starting out with research this summer? Here are some tips for creating your online presence as a scholar that maybe no one told you.

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The key components of an online presence (IMO) are:
•somewhere for people to find out that you exist and what you do
•somewhere for people to get to know you
•somewhere for people to read your work

What does “somewhere for people to find out you exist & what you do” entail?
Get an http://ORCid.org 
Ask your mentor if you are/ can be listed on their webpage
Got a publication? Create a GoogleScholar page
Create an NCBI my bibliography account

What about “somewhere for people to get to know you”? Well if you’re reading this, you’re probably already starting on that. Twitter is a great tool for networking. Find, follow, and get to know researchers you admire! Find out the hashtag(s) your field uses!

Another way to help people get to know you? Make your own website! There are lots of tools for doing this easily. If you’re work is at all collaborative or computational, I recommend getting yourself a GitHub account & then using their website builder too.

You might not need the last piece for a little while b/c good scholarship takes time, but soon you’ll want somewhere for people to read your work. Find out if your field’s journals allow self-archiving of papers & ask about pre-prints. Add these too your website as you get them!

More tips, tricks, & suggestions in these slides from a presentation I gave for postdocs a few years ago

What did I miss? https://www.slideshare.net/EleanorMurray8/building-a-professional-web-presence

Another thing you can do now to make your life a bit easier later: if you’re writing a paper and have an idea about where you might submit it to, you can create an account on the journal(s)’a submission system today, so there’s less info to input when it comes time to submit.