10 Simple Steps to Building a Reputation as a Researcher, in Your Early Career

A researcher at The National Archives in Kew (Wikipedia)

by MIT Libraries: http://informatics.mit.edu/blog/2014/09/10-simple-steps-building-reputation-researcher-your-early-career

This talk was sponsored by the MIT Postdoctoral Association with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research.

In the rapidly changing world of research and scholarly communications researchers are faced with a rapidly growing range of options to publicly disseminate, review, and discuss research - options which will affect their long-term reputation.

Junior scholars must be especially thoughtful in choosing how much effort to invest in dissemination and communication, and what strategies to use.

In this talk, I briefly discuss a number of review of bibliometric and scientometric studies of quantitative research impact, a sampling of influential qualitative writings advising this area, and an environmental scan of emerging researcher profile systems.

Based on this review, and on professional experience on dozens of review panels, I suggest some steps junior researchers may consider when disseminating their research and participating in public review and discussion.

My somewhat idiosyncratic recommendations are in three categories. The tactical, strategic, and “next steps”:

Tactical Recommendations

• Identify and use opportunities to communicate:
  • Accept invited talks, where practical
  • Announce when you will be speaking, teaching
  • Share your presentations, writings, and data
• Create a scholarly identity
  • Obtain an ORCID, domain name, twitter handle, LinkeIn profile, Google Scholar profile
  • Create a short bio and longer CV
  • Develop a research theme, and signature idea
• Communicate broadly
  • Publish writings as Open Access when possible
  • Publish data and software as open data and open source
  • Use social media (LinkedIN, Twitter) to announce new publications, teaching, speaking
• Develop communications skills early
  • Take writing lessons early
  • Take public speaking lessons early
• Monitor your impact
  • Monitor news, citation, social media metrics, and altmetrics that reflect the impact of your work
  • Keep records
  • Do this systematically, regularly, but not reactively or obsessively
• Focus on Clarity and Significance
  • Do research that is important to you and that you think is important to the world
  • When writing about your research, work to maximize clarity – including in abstracts, titles, and citations
• Give credit generously
  • Cite software you use
  • Cite data on which your analyses rely
  • Don’t be afraid to cite your own work
  • Discuss authorship early, and document contributions publicly

Unordered Strategic Recommendations

• Do research that is important to you and that you think is important to the world
• Manage your research program - find a core theme, a signature idea, and regularly review comparative strengths, comparative weaknesses, timely opportunities and future threats
• Collaborate with people you respect, and like working with, start with small steps
• Take a positive and sustained interest in the work and career of others, this is the foundation of professional networking
• Make a moderate, but systematic effort to understand and monitor the institutions within which your work is embedded.
• Identify your core strengths. Build a career around those.
• Identify the weaknesses that are continual stumbling blocks. Make them good enough.
• Pay attention to your world: exercise, sleep, diet, stress, relationships
• Don’t manage your time - manage your life: know your values, choose your priorities, monitor your progress
• Align your career with your core values

Ten Things to try right now …

Identify yourself 
1.  Register for an ORCID identifier
2. Register for information hubs: LinkedIN, Slideshare, and a domain name of your own
3. Register for Twitter

Describe yourself … write these and post to your LinkedIN and ORCID Profiles
4. Write and share a 1-paragraph bio
5. Describe your research program in 2 paragraph
6. Create a CV

Share …
7. Share (on Twitter & LinkedIN) news about something you did or published; an upcoming event in which you will participate; interesting news  and publications in your field
8.  Make writing; data; publication; software available as Open Access (through your institutional repository, SlideShare, Dataverse, FigShare)

Monitor… check and record these things regularly, but not too frequently (once a month) - and no need to react or adjust immediately
9. Set up tracking of your citations, mentions, and topics you are interested in using  Google scholar and  Google alert,
10. Find your Klout score, H-index.

In the full presentation, I show how to gather impact data, review findings from bibliometric research on how to increase impact by choosing titles, venues, and the like; and consider the advice for success given by the scores of books I’ve scanned on this topic.

The full presentation is available here:

10 SIMPLE STEPS TO BUILDING A REPUTATION AS A RESEARCHER, IN YOUR EARLY CAREER from Micah Altman