Why is it important to make your email easy to find?
If you are a researcher, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to make a website. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting grad school or have already graduated. The main idea behind having a website is to control how other researchers —or the media, potential employers, etc.— may find you. And then, of course, so that you can have all your papers readily available, as well as your CV/resume, etc. However, if you DO NOT have a website or have been postponing it because why do it today if you can do it tomorrow, then at least make sure other researchers can easily find ways to contact you.
Last week, I emailed a group of researchers about a possible collaboration with me. I could find everyone’s email within seconds EXCEPT for one. I kept looking, but after 7 minutes I gave up, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to contact him/her and they would lose the opportunity to be in this collaboration -or at least to know about it even if they decline to be involved. So I started thinking about ways to make your email public without necessarily having a website.
Here, I give you some ideas on how to make your email easy to find without having to create a website.
ORCID
If you don’t have an (ORCID ID)[orcid.org] then I suggest you start one today. Basically, it’s like having a website for academics who publish but without photos. Every time you publish a paper, it will appear listed on your orcid website. In their website, orcid states that ‘You can connect your iD with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more.’. Another great thing is that you can have all the ways in which your name may appear on a publication. For example, if your name is Andrew but sometimes people call you Andy or Drew then you can list them all here so that your publications can be linked here no matter the way your name was spelled.
Great! How do you make your email be visible here?
On orcid’s website, you can control if you want all or just some of your emails public (green circle), only visible to orcid users who have logged in (yellow circle with a key), or private, which is visible only to you (red circle with lock). Having a public orcid profile means that whenever someone googles you, they see your orcid page as one of the top searches, and right at the top left corner is your email.
Your advisor’s website
Another easy solution is to ask your advisor to include your email on his/her website. Chances are they already have one with a list of all the people working in his lab and a brief description of each one. If anyone googles you they can find your advisor’s website with your name, email, and information listed there.
Your school’s website
I went to grad school at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. On their website, they have a list of all their students, faculty, and staff. They have the option for students to have some information other than just their names listed on their website. So essentially, if you are a student, you have access to having a mini-website with a one-paragraph bio, email, CV/resume, list of publications, research interests, and a picture. Most schools will have something similar, so I encourage you to ask your school or look into it if it’s possible. My guess is that you’d just have to write an email to whoever is in charge of maintaining the website, including a picture of yourself and the rest of the information that you wish to appear on their website. An email is an easy thing to write, no?
Github
If you use r or python chances are you have a github account. You can have a profile on your github so that you include a short bio of yourself, ways to contact you, a picture, your research interests, etc. This is my github profile.
If you notice, I have icons for all the ways in which you can contact me: Twitter, email, my website. Like I mentioned earlier, I control the narrative of how I present myself. So even if you don’t have any repositories yet on your github account, you can at least have your profile ready!
Here’s a video showing you step-by-step instructions on how to create a github profile and more ways to customize it here.
And that’s it! I’ve given you 4 easy ways to make your email easy to find for other researchers/employers, etc. Hope you find them useful.
Also, I didn’t leave the researcher out. I asked a friend for his email so I included him in the invitation to the paper. However, he didn’t reply. Maybe his email is not current or is not interested.
Gabby