Useful article about managing your online reputation:
Academics should regularly “garden” their online identities to ensure that they are not being incorrectly credited with work that could damage their scholarly reputation.
That is the view of Melissa Terras, co-director of University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities, who was surprised to discover when she logged on to her Google Scholar profile that she had apparently authored a range of papers and book chapters on tarot and projective hypothesis.
This did not sit easily with Dr Terras, who describes herself on her self-titled blog as a “committed atheist” who “doesn’t care for the occult”.
“Probably the first thing you do when you are going to work with someone else, or you want to know more about their work, is to google them,” Dr Terras told Times Higher Education.
“If conference organisers are looking for a guest speaker, they will do the same. I was uncomfortable being associated with that field, but if people (had) a quick look at me online, that’s what they’d find.”
After ruling out the possibility of a namesake having written the erroneously attributed articles, Dr Terras ascertained that the error had originally occurred in the publisher Springer’s online database, which carried information about a book it distributed online titled Re-Symbolization of the Self.
But she said that it took six days of “constant emailing” and the threat of legal action before the records were changed.
Read full article.