Why your academic profile matters
Your academic profile is a narrative of your scholarly interests and expertise, your research works and teaching activities, and your future aims and ambitions.
Getting this narrative right is the key to standing out from the crowd and getting noticed, helping you to make important connections, and demonstrating your authority and expertise.
Use the guidance below to find out how to enhance your academic profile.
Plan to share your research
Your research has the power to change the world for the better. Writing a dissemination plan will help you maximise its reach and impact and will enhance your academic profile.
Write your dissemination plan early in your project and it will help you to:
- plan how and when you will communicate your research
- think about your stakeholders across the board to make sure the outputs reach the desired audiences
- map your personal career path over the next few years
- decide which new projects, requests and research directions will enhance your project or goals.
Get an ORCiD
Get an ORCID and give yourself a persistent digital identifier to distinguish yourself from other researchers, and ensure consistent, reliable attribution of your work.
Your unique ORCiD will belong to you throughout your scholalry career and can be used for:
- collating existing research in one location
- submitting to journals
- grant applications
- professional society membership
- linking with other identifiers and profiles
- displaying on your CV
- web page, social media and more.
Get a free project website
Get a free project website and become part of a self service network of websites, that showcase individual research projects from across the university, and can enhance your academic profile.
The benefits of a research.kent website are:
- Free to university staff and PhD students (with supervisor approval)
- Can be disseminated as part of your dissemination plan and integrated with external systems and datasets
- Self-service access to create and change content
- An active website for the length of the research grant requirements (tyically 10 years)
- Up to 500Mb of storage
- A stable and authoratitive URL (research.kent.ac.uk/sitename)
- Free offline website backup for archiving upon request.
Social media for researchers
Social media will allow you to maximise the reach of your research, engage with different audiences, and further enhance your academic profile.
Access our guidance about social media for researchers to:
- Discover our top tips to make the most of using social media for research
- Find out how to get started with different platforms, including Kudos and Reddit
- Understand the benefits and cautions needed using Academia.edu and ResearchGate
- Get a free University of Kent Wordpress site to start blogging about your research.
Use our repositories
Make your research works and data discoverable on Kent's repositories.
Our repositories have global reach, and rank highly in Google searches, which you can use to maximise the reach and impact of your work. Link your ORCiD to your works in the repositories, to collate your research under a single identifier, and help you to stand out from the crowd.
Find out more about our repositories and how you can use them.
Deposit your Thesis
Your Thesis will be available Open Access once its added to the Kent Academic Repository. This will make it free for anyone to read, can be easily shared and has clear reuse rights.
Your online profiles
Keep your online profiles up to date to ensure you and your research works can be easily found by others. These can include platforms such as:
Academia.edu and ResearchGate
Find out how best to use Academia.edu and ResearchGate, to help you to create profiles that summarise you and your research, whilst avoiding potential reputational damage to your academic profile:
Measure your reach and impact
Metrics are a powerful tool in measuring how far and wide your research and innovation have travelled. Using a mix of journal and author metrics will help you get a clearer understanding of your reach and impact. However, using metrics responsibly will ensure you take the drawbacks of metrics into account,
Metrics can help you to enhance your academic profile
If you've planned to share your research from the start of your project, by writing a dissemination plan, you can use metrics to assess sharing successes and consider what you would do differently in the future. This will help you to build effective dissemination routes and stakeholder engagements, which can lead to further opportunitites to enhanec your academic profile.
Responsible metrics that reflect the reach and impact of your work
Follow these top tips to help you build metrics that are useful and fair, to enhance your academic profile:
- Make sure your research works are correctly recorded in the Kent Academic Repository
- Maximise the visibility of your research
- Make your work Open Access as soon as possible
- Include Open Data reporting/references in your work
- Register for and use an ORCiD
- Use a mixture of metrics and qualitative evidence
- Provide quantitative data in context and, where possible, appropriately normalised scores can give a better picture of its meaning.
Get support
Click the button below to email the Research and Scholarly Communication team to get support with you academic profile.