How I got my Google Scholar profile verified
Unfortunately, the neo-liberal age of ranking and statistics is affecting us all, including myself. We all want to be noticed and recognized and we thus give up a chunk of our freedom and privacy to do it. I see this dilemma for what it is and, while I don’t like it, I accept it, to a certain degree.
Google Scholar is a wonderful portion of Google which searches only for scholarly articles. It can often provide the DOIs and can even sometimes link the off-site PDFs of certain articles. Besides being a good resource for students and independent scholars who cannot afford a JSTOR subscription, it can also host profiles of scholars. I even have a profile:
If you’ll notice, I have a critical piece of information on my profile: a verified email! “But, how,” you may wonder. “Don’t you need a .edu address?” Apparently not. Any address which is not from gmail.com appears to be valid for Google Scholar’s purposes. I just finished setting up my E-mail server, after a bit of trial and error (GMail still thinks I’m spam), so I decided to see if I could verify my Scholar profile as well. Eureka! It worked and I’m now a verified scholar!
So, if any of you budding scholars want to get better-recognized by Google’s search algorithms, I suggest you get your own website, your own email address that ISN’T a GMail one, and upload your work to multiple academic platforms, such as:
- Academia.edu
- ResearchGate
- Google Scholar
- Zenodo (you’ve probably never heard of it, but do it)
If you do have your own website and server, keep a backup of everything you’ve written there. It’s your work and there’s nothing wrong with storing a digital copy, as long as you don’t distribute it 😉
So, what are you waiting for? Compromise your privacy and get verified, darnit!