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.

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].

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.