Skip to Main Content

Scholarship in Graduate School

Companion guide to Grinnell College Libraries workshops. Covers the research lifecycle, publishing peer-reviewed articles, identifying research collaborators, and developing a professional online presence.

Workshop Description

Faculty and other researchers use more than LinkedIn to share their scholarship. Join Grinnell College librarians to learn about important tools that can help you not only identify faculty who you might want to work with in grad school, but develop your own scholarly network and establish a professional online presence. All students interested in pursuing grad research are welcome.  

Finding Collaborators

Scholarship is never created in a vacuum - we rely on the scholarship of others to learn about and grow our fields and to grow as researchers ourselves. Even as we are entering the scholarly conversation, we can benefit immensely from working with collaborators. In fact, it is the norm in many STEM fields to work collaborators in nearly every research project. Even fields that are much more used to single researchers (like the humanities) are embracing collaboration as it can increase diversity in scholarship, strength the results of research, and alleviate some of the cost and burdens of doing research. 

Collaboration is especially helpful in your early career. A collaborator can serve as a research mentor, guiding you in the complex processes of publishing and research. If they are well-known in the field, they also can lend credibility and authority to your research. Even collaborators in the same stage of their career as you can be helpful as they can provide a different viewpoint, set of skill, and pair of hands to your research. By collaborating with others, you also show others in your field and potential employers that you are able and willing to work with others to further develop the field. 

One of the best ways to find collaborators in your field is to get to know the others in your graduate program. Join student clubs, offer to host study groups, join up on group projects and generally be open to socializing and working with your fellow students during your graduate school years to practice your collaboration skills and identify those who have similar interests as you. 

 

Conferences are more than opportunities for professional development: most professionals who attend them use conferences to further build their networks and find potential collaborators by presenting their research to others. Conferences are typically not free, and there are some conferences that are not as reputable as others, so do your research and ask questions about them with more experienced professionals.  

Finding Conferences 

  • Conferences are typically hosted by the professional organizations that sponsor them, so joining a professional organization will keep you in the loop about potential conferences.  

  • Do a quick google search of “[your field] conferences” and you likely find some options. You can even add ”student” to the search to see if there are conferences specifically for students in the field rather than full-fledged academics.  

  • Ask your faculty members which conferences they go to. This will ensure that the conference is worth your time.  

Ways to participate in conferences 

If you simply show up to a conference, you will be missing out on the main benefit of conferences. Look into the conference and see if there is a way to participate in the following:  

  • Networking events- Typically conferences will have designated times for attendees to meet each other, chat, and learn more about what others are doing in the field. Even if you hate networking, we highly recommend doing your best to try to attend these networking events.  

  • Panels – Many conferences feature panels of experts who will lead a session about a particular topic. While you can certainly attend and ask questions during the panel, it would be even better to be a part of one! Conferences sometimes put out calls for panels, which you can submit yourself for.  

  • Presentations, posters, and papers– Conferences are made up mostly of researchers presenting their research, and the conference organizers will have a call for proposals in the months before the conference. It would be incredibly benefical to submit a proposal and present it in some form during the conference to let others know about you and your research interests. This will likely lead to others showing an interest in your research.  

Most academics belong to a professional organization of some kind that helps keep them in contact with other scholars and keeps them up to date on new developments in the field. Ask a mentor or faculty member, or simply google it yourself, to find a professional organization to join. As an added bonus, many professional organizations have mentorship programs or affinity groups--this can be an excellent way to make connections with established scholars in your field.

Below we will describe the process of creating an online scholarly presence. Since the other researchers in your field will likely not work in the same place as you, social media and a good online presence can help you retain connections you made using other methods, as well as make you and other potential collaborators findable. 

Getting touch with other researchers after they have published something related to your interest is a good way of expanding your network and potentially finding a new collaborator. Most published works will include the author's email or institutional affiliation, so it should be fairly easy to contact them to congratulate them on their work and discuss potential future collaboration. Following up with a speaker after a lecture or event you've attended is a great way to connect, too! 

Most graduate student programs will have an infrastructure in place to support tapping into existing research culture, applying for grants and fellowships, training and more. Some may have a gateway or database, listserv, or events to network. Join networks outside your discipline--graduate student senate, campus groups, affinity groups--and keep an eye out for lectures or events on campus that sound interesting, even if outside your field! This can be a great way to find interdisciplinary connections you may have not considered.

Online Research Hubs

Across disciplines, hubs like ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and ORCID can help identify researchers or find a forum through a professional organization or upcoming conference. Some institutions may have access to databases like: 

  • Pivot | subscription database that identifies potential collaborations by tracking funding
  • SciVal | a collaboration module
  • Esploro | knowledge center hosted through ExLibris
  • Dimensions is a mainly STEM research database to find data and publications, access Open Access pubs, find research grants and current projects, and set alerts for new additions.  
  • NIH RePORTER has a Matchmaker search to find potential program officials or projects that are related to your research. 

Talk with faculty and program scholars about where they have found collaborators or recommended hubs for your field. 

What comes up about you online?

 Go Google yourself! 

  • What information about you comes up with a general Google search? 
  • Is there anything you'd like to suppress? 
  • How would a future research collaborator or employer find information about you? 
  • What would you *like* a grad school colleague or professor to find about you? 

Keeping in mind what is publicly accessible can help you consider what to include in where you're directing traffic with a professional profile online you are in control of! 

Know your rights for online privacy

International laws protect some personal content. Google in summer 2024 launched a 'Results about you' dashboard to opt into checks of results of your personal information being publicly available. You can opt into alerts and through the dashboard, request removal of results from Google search. While a resource for privacy, Google also stores--and tracks--data! Review your data & privacy settings and manage your account, web and app activity, and location history.

Audit your online visibility

Terms of Service, Didn't Read is a project that gives scorecards to online sites, accounts, and more to understand the data that standard 'term agreements' opens you up to. This 2022 Wired article has tips for downsizing your digital footprint. 

Grinnell Good to Know

Following the principle of the right to be forgotten, as S&B articles move from the digital site to the archive, searches for up to 5 years are behind a 'rolling wall' as a privacy protection for students and recent grads--this means that a Google search should not return with your name as a protection for students freedom of speech and publication while beginning future careers. Want to feature articles you've written or are featured in? Search directly through the S&B site or archive to add to your personal portfolio--direct links are publicly accessible. 

Researcher Profiles

Research Profiles are online tools for researchers to link their work with their information so others can find the researcher's details and other scholarship. These profiles make it easy for you and others to find collaborators and see their other works. Several companies allow you to create a research profile and connect your work to it, and it is beneficial to develop your research profile for each platform.  

Google Scholar and Orcid are two examples and are described in the next tabs. Other platforms like Academia.edu and Research Gate also provide research profiles, but they also include more social media features and are covered in the next section. 

Almost all college students have used Google Scholar at one point or another. Have you ever noticed or clicked on the hyperlinked author's name when looking a result? Doing that will take you to that author's research profile if they have set one up. These profiles should include things like the scholar's current role and institutional affiliation, research areas, and  a comprehensive list of their publications. Viewers can also see a researcher's citation metrics on a researcher's profile, which is explained more below. Most everything on these profiles are added by the researchers themselves, with the exception of the citation metrics. 

When you are ready to set up your Google Scholars profile, you should follow the steps outlined in University's of Michigan's "Claim your Google Scholar Profile" guide. It is important to note that to create a researcher's profile, you are required to select a publication that you have authored. If you haven't published anything yet, or if your publication is not showing up, you can add someone else's and then quickly remove that publication.

  Orcid stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, and setting up your research profile with Orcid gives you a unique Orcid ID. This ID serves as a way to distinguish yourself from other researchers (especially those with the same name) and link your scholarship to the rest of your information. Many publishers, grant awarders, schools and other institutions will ask for an Orcid ID so they can ensure that you get credit for your work. Several databases like Scopus link to author's profiles via their Orcid IDs, making it easy for other researchers to find scholarship and reach out to authors.  Another benefit of Orcid is that it allows researchers to keep their scholarship connected to them even if their name changes! 

Use the SFU guide "Distinguish yourself with ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID" to learn more about Orchid and how to set up an ID, or jump right in and set one up at orcid.org . 

ImpactStory is less popular than Google Scholar and Orcid, but it has the huge bonus of being an open-source program run by a not-for-profit organization. 

Scholarly Social Media

Most of us use social media for sharing pet photos, keeping up with friends and family, and for entertainment. However, social media can also be used to boost your academic career! Researchers can join informal conversations on their research topic, find collaboration-ready scholars, learn about new academic opportunities, find out about new and unpublished updates in their field, discover new groups and conference to join, and let others know of their research by crafting a professional social media presence. 

Academia.edu, LinkedIn, and Research Gate are all social platforms gear towards a professional audience and that researchers will benefit from using. This section also discusses how to use more traditional social media platforms professionally. When using any of these platforms, keep in mind that what you post is never truly private and ill-advised social media activity can have very real consequences for your professional and academic career. Most researchers work in narrow, highly specialized fields, which means that there is a good chance that the people they interact with on social media will one day be a potential coworker, collaborator, mentor or superior.  A good rule of thumb is act as professional on your professional social media as you would at your place of work. You will also need to keep in mind copyright when upload examples of your work. Even if you wrote the article you want to post, it is very likely that the publisher of the article actually owns the work and you may not make it widely available. 

Much like your in-person professional presence, your professional social media presence will only be beneficial if you actively contribute to it. In the online world, no one can know to include you on their scholarly discussions if they do not know you are there! Congratulate other researchers on their accomplishments, provide your informed and respectful opinion in conversations, share your own research or exciting finds, and don't be afraid to reach out to other researchers when you are working on similar research - even if you are not as established or "impressive" as they are.  

Academia.edu is a platform for sharing academic research. The founder wanted a place for sharing who he was, what he was working on, and his papers without having to create his own site. Aside from giving scholars a "homepage", Academia.edu tracks citations, and notifies you when you are mentioned, referenced, thanked or acknowledge by an author.

Researchers can find papers and other researchers who are working in their field quickly by using their Research Topics option. 

While LinkedIn is not strictly for academics, it is still one of the most commonly used social media sites for finding like-minded colleagues. Populate your profile with your education, skills, and content like presentations so others can find you. Build your network to find more researchers who are interested in the same field. 

Grinnell College also provides access to LinkedIn Learning, a platform for online courses in lots of different areas like learning how to wrangle large datasets in SQL to soft skills like effective time management. You can connect your personal account to your LinkedIn learning account, so others can see the skills you gained. 

Xing is a direct competitor of LinkedIn and is more popular in European, but is gaining traction in the US and other regions.

ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. 

Hypothes.is is a free open-source application that enables collaborative reading and annotation of text documents displayed in a web browser. Digital annotation enables people to create comments and notes in the margin of texts and to engage in threaded conversations. Annotations may include media components such as hyperlinks, images, and video.

While Hypothes.is is typically used by instructors to have students collaboratively annotate class readings, it can also be an interesting way for researchers to share their thoughts on recent papers and find others who are interested in the same readings. 

While Mendeley is known more for its role as a citation manager, it is also an academic social network. You can develop a profile, share research papers, and connect with researchers. 

Some fields have specific social media sites that serve as a networking location for the field's scholars. Sometimes these are connected to professional organizations, like the American Libraries Association ALA Connect, but other times they are their own entity, like Humanities Commons. Do some online searching or ask mentors if they know of any of these resources. If there is one, make it a priority to create an account and start diving in! These sites will be great resources for finding new fellowship or job opportunities, keeping up to date on developments in the fields, finding new conferences and listservs, learning about calls for chapter proposals, and meeting potential collaborators.    

Researchers and Scholars often share their opinions, successes, and other information on traditional social media platforms. The platform formerly known as Twitter was especially favored by academics, and researchers exchanged ideas, commented on related news events, discussed others' research, and presented their research to a much wider audience. 

No matter which social media site you use, make sure your professional social media is separate from your personal social media. It is good practice to keep your personal social media on a private setting so it isn't discoverable by professional contacts, while keeping your professional social media public so those contacts see your professional page. On your personal page, avoid linking your job title or other professional identifying information so you can post freely without it reflecting on your employer or institution. 

Since these social media sites are open to everyone, using them means you could be interacting with people who are not professional academics. While this can be a good thing, it also opens you up to more public, less researched, and less professional criticism. Don't take these negative interactions to heart and do not respond to them - if you play in the garbage with the trolls, you will only come out looking dirty. 

 

Below are some resources about using traditional social media sites for academic networking: 

Impact Factors and YOU

Impact factors are metrics used to measure the reach of a researcher's publications. There are several different kinds that evaluate the impact of journals, researchers and articles. Impact factors are taken into consideration when researchers apply for jobs, tenure and grants. However, there is substantial research into the failures and biases of these metrics, so do not discount work or researchers based on these metrics alone. Even researchers with less-than-ideal impact factors can be creative in how they present the factors to others in order to stay ahead in their careers. 

H-Index is an author-level metric that is derived from the count of citations to the author's publications. H-index is also applied to different publications and institutions. Typically the data for this metric will come from large citation databases like Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. Because of this, it is very important to make sure your profile is correctly set up in ORCID and Google Scholar. 

Keep in mind that the H-Index does not take into account the size or popularity of a field. The most important paper written on dragonfly mating patterns in the Great Lakes region will have a much lower H-Index than a mediocre paper on aspirin usage. 

H-Index also doesn't make a distinction between positive citations that validate the work and negative citations that debunk the work. A very controversial author will have a high H-Index, even if the research community at large disagrees with the author's findings. 

Altmetric Attention Score is tracked by Altmetrics and the Dimensions databases, as well as other sources. This score is calculated by how often an article, book, chapter etc is mentioned on News articles, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, Wikipedia, Policy Documents (per source), Q&A, F1000, Publons, Pubpeer, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Open Syllabus, and Google+.  Researchers can use this score to understand the attention their work receives online and can compare themselves to others using the "Score in Context" feature on the Altmertics page. 

This score isn't  transparent, so researchers are not able to easily verify the results. Furthermore, individual authors can artificially inflate their scores by promoting themselves on social media. Much like the H-index, Altmetrics track attention whether it is good or bad attention. Because the score measures attention, articles that are open access will have higher score simply because they are more easily available, not because they are more impactful. 

 

Like the H-Index, the Field Weighted Citation Impact score measures citations, but the score addresses the disparities in popularity of different fields that the H-Index neglects. This is done by looking at the average number of citations papers in a specific field get and then comparing the citations the scholarship in question receives. Ideally this means that the most impactful paper about a niche subject like historic Greek warships will receive the same score as an equally impactful paper about a commonly researched topic like COVID vaccine effectiveness.  

However, this score is problematic. First, the division of the fields is often unclear and arbitrary, especially for interdisciplinary research. The fields are also very broad, meaning that niche subtopics are still compared unfairly to more popular subtopics. Furthermore, the score also does not do a great job of controlling for outliers, which can make average citation count much higher than it should be, and therefore making scores of impactful papers lower than they should be.  

Much like podcasts, researchers can track their impact by tracking the number of downloads of their paper. However, this has some obvious pitfalls. First, someone downloading an article does not mean that they read the article or agree with the scholarship. Second, this does not count views that occur without downloads, or those who read physical versions. Next, this score is not something that is aggregated by a single entity - authors must track all the downloads across every platform their research is available on themselves, and then report it themselves. Furthermore, authors can easily inflate their numbers by downloading the research themselves multiple times. 

Presenting your impact factors is a tricky task, especially if you are new in your research career. We recommend that researchers wait to display their impact factors on their own pages until they have more publications and time to build up their research's impact. That being said, it is common for researchers to be asked for this information, so knowing how to present your fledgling factor scores is important.

  • Make sure to highlight the dates of publication. All the impact metrics increase with time, so a recently published item will often have a low score. If possible, compare your score with the historical data of an impactful paper. 
  • At all times, provide context for the score. This can come in many forms, like a comparison to other papers in the field, or a blog post explaining why a score is what it is. 
  • Choose the best score for you: Do some research into which score puts you in the best light. 
  • Keep in mind that your score does not determine the value of your research and your value as a researcher cannot be summed up with a simple score. When presenting your impact factors, make sure to highlight all the things you do as a researcher that the scores do not capture, like presenting at conferences and editing journals.

 

 

Creating an Professional Website

Creating and maintaining your own professional website is a great way to be present online and have a cohesive site to update when between institutions, heading to a conference, or on the job market. Many graduate school programs will have you create a scholar profile page, but often these are managed by department staff and cumbersome to keep up to date. Managing a personal website is a great way to direct traffic and curate your professional online self. A professional website can be a great networking option to have online, include a QR code to on a printed business card, or have a code ready to share for new contacts to scan at a conference. 

Did you know that you can claim your own domain, completely free of charge through Sites@Grinnell? Run by the Digital Liberal Arts Collective (DLAC), Sites@Grinnell allows you to request a domain and then install a wide variety of web tools to make the ideal website. Even better, the folks at DLAC are available to give you a wide array of technical support for your website - something that you will not get with the other website options! You can also get peer-support through the Vivero Program

You can also do much more than create a professional website with Sites@Grinnell - you can also get a head start on digitally publishing your research! This can be a great way to expand your CV, impress future employers, and highlight your skills to potential collaborators.

Please talk to the folks at DLAC about the timeline of your project. After graduating, you will no longer have access to Sites@Grinnell, but DLAC can help you export your website and give pointers on where to set up a more permanent domain. 

There are a lot of options beyond paid website platforms like Wix and Squarespace which start around $16/month and have a wide array of robust website designs--often more than an academic profile needs! If you are looking to host data or have larger media, explore your options.

Every personal portfolio will look different but can highlight areas of your research or background of most interest to you. Ideas to consider: 

  • About you. A short introductory bio about you, your education, and research interests. Check out bios of scholars you know--and those in the Online Examples tab!--for inspiration. Tips: stay under 200 words or less and synthesize research you're curious about, methodology, subfields, or themes of your interests to anchor your introduction.
  • A professional photo. In need of a headshot, Grinnellians? Check out the Iris Photo Booth on the 2nd floor of the JCC. 
  • CV or Resume. Take another look at your resume before posting and remove any contact information you don't want included!
  • Teaching statement. A very common piece to include if your seeking a teaching position, this is a short statement on your pedagogy philosophy and way to highlight your experience with instruction. 
  • Portfolio of projects. Link out to online projects or summarize works in progress. 
  • Research interests. A great way to show interest in areas of research you may not have a project focused on yet. 
  • Blog. Consider a blog feature to talk about your current projects or progress. See more ideas in the 'Blogging' tab!
  • Contact Information. Make sure to include up to date contact information and how best to get in touch. Don't want cold calls? Don't list your phone number! 

Interested in a research blog? Find others in your field for inspiration. Consider making a group blog with cohort peers. Some blog platforms have options for subscribers to be notified of new posts. If you are a Zotero user, make a folder to link out to blogs or podcast sites you follow. This is great to consult when you are asked in an interview 'how you stay current' or want to find an article you read recently as a reference! Some favorite academic blogs:

Take a look at online professional profiles from academics from the Examples Online tab or search for a scholar you are familiar with. What appeals to you about their online site? What elements would you like to incorporate into your own profile? What platform are they using?