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Research Impact Challenge at Bradley University

This guide contains 10 activities for researchers to better understand and manage their online scholarly presence, as well as the impact and reach of their research.

Day 5: Your personal web page -- pulling the pieces together

Welcome to the fifth day of the Research Impact Challenge! Earlier this week, you registered your ORCID, claimed your Google Scholar Profile, explored a digital repository, and reflected on your use of social media. Today, we’ll pull all of these pieces together on your personal web page. Let’s get started!

Here's how to do it: 

1. Identify the web page you will use for today’s challenge. You can work with any public web page that contains information about you and your work, and that you are able to edit directly. We recommend the following:

First choice: If you have a departmental or staff profile page. To make edits to your page, contact the BU marketing department.

Second choice: Use the ORCID profile you created on Day 1, or any public profile on a platform like Humanities Commons, Open Science Framework, or other social networking platform.

Third choice: Use your own independent website or blog, if you have one.

2. Your goal is to ensure that all the work you’ve done this week to establish and manage your presence on the web is fully integrated into your web page. Check your website for each of the following:  

  • Your ORCID ID and link to your ORCID profile
  • Link to your Google Scholar profile
  • Link(s) to any repositories where you have deposited your work (see Bonus Challenge, below)
  • Links to any social media profiles or feeds that you want your colleagues to know about, follow, or connect with

As well, make sure that the URL for your personal web page is included in all of the spaces listed above! You may also want to include it in your email signature. 

3. While you’re here, check that any other information on your personal web page (email address, campus address & phone number, research and teaching interests, etc.) is present and up-to-date!

Bonus Challenge: if you currently have documents posted to your personal webpage, consider depositing those files in a repository instead. Then, link to those items in the repository, rather than hosting them directly on your web page.

What next? 

Consider the pros and cons of maintaining your own personal website:

Investigate what additional support and services may be available to faculty and staff through your college or department.

Learn more:

If you decide it makes sense to have a website of your own, there are many opportunities to develop the skills to create and maintain your site: 

Preparing for the next challenge: 

Congratulations! You've completed Week One of the Research Impact Challenge!

Starting with Week 2 / Day 6, we'll shift gears to focus on how the impact of scholarly work is measured, communicated, and evaluated.