Abstract : Is having a personal academic website worth the
effort? Does a personal site provide real benefits to the research,
education, and societal service activities of a scholar? Referring to
selected examples, this study shows how a personal academic website can
effectively serve the overall purpose of scholarly work, whatever the
scholarly field.
1. Introduction
A personal academic website is a personal website owned and managed by a
scholar to present her/his activities in the three fields (research,
education and societal service) comprising the academic profession
[1].
Usually, it is a website with its own domain (uniform resource locator,
URL), and not a subdomain of another website, owned and managed by a
scholar. Plentiful websites (Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, WordPress.com,
etc.) offer free web space to create a personal academic website, but
only using their subdomain. Owning the domain name has a modest annual
cost but the domain permanently belongs to its owner (modest annual
renewal cost) and the website is controlled uniquely by its owner with
no advertising and other content not pertinent to a personal academic
website [2].
Several guides are freely available on the web to develop a usable and
aesthetically pleasant academic website. Numerous online companies offer
websites specifically designed for academics with templates for
publications, projects, courses, etc. One company, for example, offers a
basic service for free and a “pro” version at affordable cost which
allows to create and release a personal academic website in less than an
hour, and then grow it over time by updating it regularly [3].
This study aims to answer a research question: is having a personal
academic website worth the effort with respect to the three main
dimensions of scholarly work (research, education, and societal
service)? Surprisingly, very little scholarly research has been
published on personal academic websites. A search carried out by early
May 2023 on two large research databases online (Google Scholar [4]
and Dimensions [5]) with the query “personal academic website”
returned only 33 and 23 articles, respectively. Said pioneering
research, however, unveiled early revealing outcomes.
In 2006 Thelwall and co-workers found that the web impact of a scientist
“personal homepage” measured by the “inlink” counts (the number of
incoming links to the page) was clearly associated to the presence of
full-text articles (the latter articles being the most linked-to content
in homepages) [6].
Seven years later Más-Bleda and Aguillo found that 64% of highly cited
researchers in western Europe and in Israel only had a personal web page
hosted on the domain of the employer institution [7]. The same
researchers, they also found, publicized their research online either
through a digital object identifier (DOI) link to the online version of
their articles on the publisher website or by “outlinks” to PDF
versions of their articles generally posted in open access (OA)
repositories [8]. Confirming the poor uptake of open science
principles and tools by research chemists [9], not even one of the
fifty highly cited chemistry researchers in the ranking linked to any OA
repository [8].
The need for the present study stems from a single fact: thirty years
after the introduction of the World-Wide Web in 1993 [10], most
scholars worldwide do not have a personal academic website. For
instance, in 2016, the share of the surveyed researchers maintaining
websites that also targeted web users “who are not scientists or
students” was found to be 11% in Germany, 13% in Taiwan and 17% in
the USA [11]. These figures may even be overestimated because the
surveyed scientists likely referred to the personal web page hosted by
their employer website, and not to their personal academic website,
namely a self-managed website either on a personal domain or on one.
Accordingly, recent investigation of nearly 1,000 faculty members in the
disciplines of physics, biology and chemistry at universities in
Germany’s Lower Saxony found that online presentations on institutional
websites were “mostly rudimentary” [12]. The scope of having a
personal academic website, as we show in the following, goes far beyond
the need to “attract attention to your publications”, or increase
“your name recognition”, and “get cited more”
[13].
2. Serving academic work purpose
On April 1993 Berners-Lee, a physicist working at European Laboratory of
Particle Physics, published the source code for the first royalty-free
“browser” and editor dubbed “World-Wide Web” [10]. In a few
months, the first browsers became freely available to “navigate”
content in the WWW (shortened “Web”) alongside editing software
“applications” to produce the web pages written in the hypertext
markup language (HTML).
Likewise the internet [14], also the Web was invented by scientists
to enhance communication amid scientists as “a pool of human knowledge
which would allow collaborators on remote sites to share their ideas and
all aspects of a common project” [10]. Scholars en masse ,
one would expect, would have soon adopted a personal website to share
their research, educational and public outreach academic work.
Unfortunately, this was not the case with the share of scholars owning a
personal academic website nearly 25 years after the invention of the Web
being remarkably low even in high income countries hosting a large
number of scientists [11].
This fact shows that most scholars continue to consider a personal
website an unnecessary communication tool wasting valued working time.
Perhaps, only early career researchers working in today’s “precarious
times” [15] understood the relevance of a personal
website to their work “to aggregate… dozen course pages, three
project blogs, scattered professional profiles and twitter account, into
one accessible, aesthetically pleasing and not too difficult to manage
personal website” [15]. In the following, thus, we show how having
a personal academic actually serves the purpose of scholarly work with
respect to its three main dimensions of scholarly work: research,
education, and societal service.