My Liaison Librarian colleague and I are on a mission to encourage the researchers on campus to create a Research Profile on the university’s website. Equally important though is to keep the profile up to date. There are huge demands on a researcher’s time but the value of having a current profile was illustrated to me just last week.
Let me tell you the story….
Three years ago 2 Associate professors and a Dr walked into a campus café. After exchanging greetings and catching up on the latest gossip, the opportunity to apply for a writing grant was discussed. It was decided that a “foundation article” that outlined the methodology for my doctoral research would be a good choice and I was fortunate to be successful with the grant application (thank you UON School of Education Publishing Support Strategy).
The article was written and submitted to a prestigious journal who after three massive revisions that met all of the reviewers' suggestions, still didn’t have the article that their reviewers obviously wanted written. We parted amicably and sent our article to another journal … more closely aligned with the doctoral research topic of oral storytelling. We received conditional acceptance if we addressed the (very reasonable) issues raised by the two reviewers. We resubmitted in late 2015 and waited for the article to be published.
The journal went through a few organisational issues in the meantime and the publication date for the new issue kept being put back but we finally received confirmation that the article would be published in July 2016 (fortunately the content of the article would still be relevant).
Now here’s the punchline of the story….
Last week I received an email that made my heart initially plummet.
“Your article didn’t include bios. I thought I had emailed you previously, but I think the email may not have gone through as I when I sent this email I noticed that it bounced back, and I needed to correct the email address…and so I check to see if the previous email went through, and I don’t see it in my inbox. “
I thought after all this time that our article was going to miss the deadline due to this communication breakdown and be delayed until the next issue of the journal.
But (and here it is – the moral of the story) our intrepid Managing Editor of the journal had searched on the UON website, found the CURRENT Researcher Profile for all three authors and moved the article on to copy-editing stage. We will have the opportunity to modify the bios but they will now only require minor tweaks due to using the up to date information from the profiles.
So there you have it. While establishing a Researcher profile is great, maintaining it is even better. Not only can potential collaborators see what your latest research is, other researchers can locate your publications, increasing your citations. As this story illustrates, having a current research profile can also avert publishing delays and get your work out there to be seen by fellow researchers.
So what are you waiting for? Have a look at your own research profile. If it needs some work to build it up then contact your Librarian. For Ourimbah researchers, we will be hosting 2 staff profile photograph days in late July if your headshot needs renewing. For researchers at other institutions, it's worth contacting your subject librarian to see if they can organise a photo shoot. If your profile needs updating, then perhaps the mid-year break is the perfect opportunity to spend some time on it.
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