A few well-kept profiles make your work findable and make sure the right work is attributed to the right you. The best reason to keep them is unglamorous but solid: they disambiguate your identity across journals and institutions, and they give search tools (increasingly AI-driven) clean, consistent signals to describe you accurately. Claims that profiles directly boost your citations are weaker than they sound, so treat this as low-effort infrastructure rather than a growth strategy. Set the anchors up early, keep them current, and cross-link them.
The two anchors
Start with these during your first weeks and use your UC Davis email while you’re here. They carry the strongest, best-evidenced benefits: identity, attribution, and discoverability.
- ORCID: a permanent iD that uniquely identifies you and travels with you between institutions and email addresses. Use it on every submission; most publishers and funders now require it.
- Google Scholar: your public citation record, and the profile most people (and tools) check first.
Situational profiles
Useful depending on your field and goals, but lower priority than the anchors:
- ResearchGate: for sharing full texts and connecting with other researchers.
- FigShare: for citable datasets, figures, and supplementary materials.
Keep them current and linked
A stale or inconsistent profile is worse than none: it misattributes or hides your work, and it gives search tools conflicting signals.
- Use one canonical name and affiliation everywhere, exactly as it appears on your papers, so your outputs group correctly.
- Cross-link your profiles to each other and to your UC Davis page. That triangulation is what lets both people and AI tools describe you accurately.
- Add each new output (paper, preprint, dataset) as it appears, and link your ORCID iD so records sync automatically where possible.
- Keep a CV current alongside your profiles: update it the day you have news, not once a year when you need it.
See how it’s done. Christina keeps a public Google Scholar and ORCID profile, plus a UC Davis faculty page. Use them as a model.
If you’re headed to industry
Industry hiring reads different signals than academia. A public GitHub with real, documented projects is checked by most technical recruiters, and a working portfolio or demo often carries more weight than a polished CV. LinkedIn tends to be the hub that ties your profiles, resume, and projects together. If this is your path, keep your best code public and readable (see Code) and tailor a one-to-two-page resume per role.
Get industry specifics from someone who’s done it. Christina’s career has been in academia, so treat the guidance above as a starting point, not authority. For what a given employer actually looks for, talk to people with direct industry experience and use campus resources like the GradPathways Career Management program (see Career planning & job search).
Communicate your work (optional)
Profiles make your work findable; talks and plain-language summaries make it land. When your research reaches a wider audience (a talk, poster, press piece, or public summary), keep the framing accurate and free of hype, in line with how the lab talks about its work, and loop in Christina before representing the lab publicly.
A public social presence is genuinely optional and the evidence for its payoff is thin, so only invest if you enjoy it. If you do, the research community has largely moved to Bluesky rather than X.
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