Thanks to this post at This Week in Evolution, I discovered one can have a personnal page in google scholar, to group and “revendicate” her/his papers: a recurrent issue when you jump from a field to the other is that you decrease the odds of being acknowledged as an author (“is that really the same gal/dude?” syndrome), and eventually more jumps, less academic visibility. Which may be important if you wish people to know who you are, what you did, even when they are not looking at a résumé. That is, when you look for a job.
I’m still trying to figure out what can be done to leave free lunch reprints for other scientists to pick up if they need to. Maintaining a personnal website may be time-consumming. I did something in a pre- web 2.0 era but eventually got swamped by all the other things in life.
So this is an opportunity, except that you still can’t really leave out reprints for people to take home. (I tried with academia.edu, which is working fine in this regard, except that now you need to have an account to download papers of others). (Did I mention it is there?).
I remember first that academia.edu was at a time only open to those who had an official affiliation, and I was of course an independent scholar when I first discovered the site (I have’nt yet spent as much time as an independent scholar as as an official scientist but who knows?). Now google scholar accounts make exactly the same thing: your page can’t be searchable in the scholar database if you don’t have an official affiliation. Thanks for us independent scholars, guys*! We are looking for a job before fame but we’re not acknowledged as regular scholars ?!? Grrr!
Anyway, my page is here. And if you’re looking for a post-doc for your lab, feel free to email me! :-) (I’m ready to go worldwide, maybe even in Alaska!).
PS: wordpress is funny. It is recommanding some strange tags for this post: “debt consolidation”. No thanks! :-)
* Assuming they are guys. Any woman would have figured out that not everybody has a place in Academia, wouldn’t she?
