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Digital Scholarship Centre

If you are interested in incorporating digital methods in your research, the DSC is your one-stop-shop to the many resources available at the University

About this guide

This guide is a starting point for improving your online presence. There is a range of tools for expanding and shaping your online presence and this guide makes some suggestions and outlines a number of strategies for taking your online visibility to the next level. These suggestions are just some of what is currently available. There are many alternative platforms, and new ones are being created all the time while older ones fall away. To choose which tools and platforms to use, think about what you want to achieve. At the same time, try experimenting with new platforms and find what works the best for you.

Why should you pay attention to your online presence?

Academics want to make a difference; having an influence is almost a job requirement. Research and other outputs need to be found and read, and nowadays that means online. An online searcher browsing a topic is likely to use what they find online rather than forage for more in the analogue world. Moreover, someone looking for you personally is likely to accept what they find as the full story. This means that academics need to know what is already out there about them, whether they like what they see, and whether their work is actually ‘findable’ at all.

The benefits of assessing and improving your online presence

Being aware of your current online visibility gives you some control

  • You will gain a sense of what your digital shadow looks like, i.e., content about you posted and uploaded by others, or even created by you inadvertently.
  • You will make informed decisions about your digital footprint, i.e., what you want your active contribution to, and interaction with, the online world to look like.

Increasing your own visibility enables you to:

  • Gain recognition in your field and beyond
  • Communicate your research to a wider audience
  • Grow your networks

Increasing the visibility of your scholarly outputs will:

  • Increase the impact of your work and potentially increase citations
  • Make your work available to the widest audience

Your digital identity online is the extent to which others can identify you online as a scholar. This is why it is critical to become aware of your online presence and to shape and maintain this presence. The best way to drown out content about yourself that you may not like is to upload content of your choice.

Step 1

Look at ways to assess your general online presence as it is today. Regular assessment will allow you to keep track of your progress.

Do a general Google search (or use Bing and Yahoo together with Google - these are the top 3 search engins) using your name as the search term. To narrow the search, add your institution's name and/or subject area. Remember to look at all the search results, including images, videos, books, discussions, etc.

  • What results come up about you? How distinctive are they? Do you share a name with someone in a different field?
  • Are all the results from your institutions? Publications? Other resources? Online profiles? Are non of the results relevant to you?
  • Consider where you would like to appear. What is your niche? If someone searched for a topic, where would you like to appear?
  • It is not vanity but a necessity to set up Google alerts so you can automatically keep an eye on your developing presence and follow your online footprint and shadow.

Also look at how easily your traditional scholarly outputs (journal articles, book chapters, etc.) can be found online. This also offers you a way of doing citation tracking (seeing who has been citing our articles and using this as a measure of impact). Find out using :

  • Google Scholar
  • Web of Knowledge (Web of Knowledge is a search and citation indexing platform, provided by Thomson Reuters, for scholarly articles in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.)
  • Scopus  (Scopus is an Elsevier-owned database of scholarly article abstracts and citations.)

What did you find?

  • Which of your articles came up in the search? Were they the articles you thought/hoped would appear? Did some of your articles not appear anywhere?
  • Set up a Google Scholar alert so you can automatically keep an eye on your developing presence and follow your online footprint and shadow.
  • If the results are obviously nothing to do with you, your research output or institution, consider if you have a very common name. A name shared by several people with an online presence can make finding the 'right person' difficult. Consider how you can make your name more distinctive, e.g. if you publish paper using a middle initial, you should include that initial in your online profiles. Also see ORCID as a way to disambiguate names.

Ascertain your broader impact by looking beyond citations. Altmetrics, short for alternative metrics, are ways of tracking your content’s impact online and seeing the variety of ways your papers and other outputs are being used. These metrics stretch beyond traditional citations. They measure your online output in alternative ways, such as bookmarks of your articles in Mendeley, mentions in blogs, tweets containing links to your publications and much, much more. There are several services you can use to obtain altmetrics, as well as viewing altmetrics on platforms like ScienceDirect.

The following are subscription services you can use to track altmetrics:

What did you find?

Using these tools, did you find any altmetric results for your outputs? Did the results surprise you? What strategies might you decide on to change the results you found?

Step 2

Your next step is to decide where you want to take your online presence. Once you’ve decided on a strategy, it is time to consider your active online presence, the specifics of your digital footprint. This step focuses on online profiles that you might have already or that you might want to set up. 

There are many ways to increase your visibility online. However, they all take time and effort, so decide on your priorities, taking into account your technical ability and how much time you can invest. You want to avoid ‘multiple profile disorder’ so decide which of your profiles are important to you, and consider linking them to whichever one you update regularly. Having a few well-maintained and updated profiles is better than a broad but neglected online presence

  • Your personal or institutional profile

    • Universities with websites often have academic staff profiles. This institutional profile is a good opportunity to present to the world your scholarship, research interests, publications, teaching resources and achievements. Make sure that this page contains up-to-date and relevant information, pictures relating to your activities and accurate contact details. Contact UFS Communication and Marketing for more information on how to update your UFS profile. Also, having a personal website can also be beneficial in raising your online profile and establishing and maintaining your personal brand. 

  • Professional and academic networking site profiles
  • Social networking

Think about the following when making choices about platforms:

  • Do you need all the profiles you have? Which do you actually use? If you have profiles on several services, perhaps keep one main profile and link all the others to it. 
  • Do you have more than one profile with the same service? Consolidate your multiple profiles with the same service, otherwise it can be confusing for those looking for information.
  • Do you want to use different profiles for different purposes? Are some services more suitable for your discipline than others? Are more of your colleagues using a certain service?

Step 3

This step is about making your scholarly outputs reach as many people as possible. While you may publish prolifically, if people can’t discover your content online, they are much less likely to read it. Some say that if it’s not findable online it might as well not exist. This step involves assessing what publications and other outputs of yours are already online and then sharing everything else you are able to. You are also encouraged to share all your scholarly outputs, including teaching resources and ‘popular or informal’ resources in a variety of formats.

  • Archive
    • Put online all the journal articles that you can. You can self-archive your articles in our institutional repository, KovsieScholar. The copyright agreement with your publisher will determine what version of the article you can share and when. You can check publisher archiving policies on SHERPA/RoMEO.
  • Discipline-specific repositories are also available to archive:
  • Change the way you publish

    • Archiving almost always has a time delay, but publishing in open access journals means immediate availability to all with internet access. Open access publishing increases visibility, opportunity for use and potential impact. All of this with no compromise on quality — peer-reviewed open access journals go through the same editorial process and the same quality control checks as their non-open access counterparts.

  • Open everything

    • It’s not only journal articles you can share. Consider making all your scholarly outputs available online and sharing your research in different ways. Academia.edu has sections for outputs such as blog posts and teaching resources. You can upload your conference presentations, PDFs, videos and webinars on to a service like Slideshare, which enables you share your presentations with the world, and which provides some data on your views and downloads. Consider sharing your teaching resources. See the UFS OER collection. And share your data on our figshare data repository.

    • Take a look at our Creative Commons guide to learn more about sharing your copyrighted work with open licenses.

  • Careful curation
    • Maximise discoverability of your work by careful curation. Take metadata seriously and add tags, keywords and descriptions to a file you are uploading to a platform. If you want to be found, investing five minutes in tagging is well worth it in the long term.

Step 4

Now you can review some other strategies and tools through which you can communicate with colleagues and interact with people who share your interests. While having an online profile on a platform such as ResearchGate or LinkedIn is a first step, in order to fully interact with others online, you need to engage with them. 

Here are a few ways:

  • Become a curator
    • Hypothes.is enables research, sharing and collaboration. You can use it to highlight parts of an article or add notes. These annotations will remain on the page when you return. You can share your annotations or keep it private. 
    • Delicious and Bitly are bookmarking tools, allowing you to save links and organise them in collections. You can also keep it private, or some of your library in these tools, or share publicly.
  • Keeping up with your discipline
    • Twitter can be invaluable professionally. As a 'real-time information network' it can connect you to just about anything that sparks your interest and give you up to date access to what is happening in your field. See this guide to Twitter for academics and researchers.
  • Explore other tools and find what works for you
    • Consider blogging about your research and what your research group is doing to engage with different audiences - colleagues, students or your community. Blogging is both simple and complicated, and can be handled in many different ways. You might blog as a individual or get your whole research group involved. Wordpress and Blogger are some of the platforms available. To find out more about the blog tool available on the UFS website, contact UFS Communication and Marketing. Or consider a contribution to The African Digital Scholar.
  • Manage and share your papers
  • Maximise discoverability by using social media

    • If you’re sceptical about the value of publicising your research through social media, consider that by putting it out there and talking about it, you are bringing it to the attention of someone who may find it useful, or who will pass it along to others who will.

A flow diagram of the steps

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