Scholarly Identity

Social media plays an important role in your scholarly identity, as it allows you to make meaningful connections, increase the visibility of your work, and engage in largescale communication. Scholars can use various social media platforms to:

• Engage with diverse audiences including academics, practitioners, political figures, and community members.
• Further the scholarly conversation around relevant topics in their discipline. 
• Stay up-to-date with current research trends and methods. 
• Discover professional development opportunities including calls for papers, conferences, and research funding.
• Explore new findings in their field.
• Share their research online. 

If you utilize social media platforms to advance your scholarly identity, it is important to outline a social media strategy. Researchers Jaime Clifton-Ross, Ann Dale, and Dr. Jaigris Hodson have created a series of best practices to help develop a social media strategy in Academic Research Curation: Best Practices Guide. 

Blogs and personal websites are great options for showcasing your entire career, as they allow you to create separate pages dedicated to your research interests, current projects, publishing history, and much more. This flexibility allows you to prioritize specific projects and intentionally curate how your work is shared. These platforms can also showcase artist portfolios more easily than other social media sites, and they can highlight a researcher's creativity through the use of design and layout. Utilize blogs and personal websites to create a more holistic scholarly identity that represents who you are as a scholar.

• Maintain separate personal and professional social media accounts. Utilize each platform's privacy settings to ensure personal accounts are private.
• Use the name that you publish under across all professional accounts and avoid abbreviations or nicknames.
• Maintain the same profile picture across all social media and web platforms. Your headshot should be a professional, high-quality image.
• Stay active and keep your profile updated.
• Familiarize yourself with Purdue Fort Wayne's social media policy.