How to build your research leadership "brand"?

Why online engagement is crucial in building up your profile; it is hard to build up a presence without having a digital trace

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 11 Dec 2024 08:03 (updated Wed 4 Dec 2024 01:09)

In May 2024 I was asked to participate in a webinar series organised by the Research Leadership Development Consortium (RLDC), a network that designs and organises development events that strengthen and support research leadership in the social sciences. The topic of the session was two-fold: building strong research connections and developing your research leadership brand.

This post shares my personal experiences about building my research leadership brand, with an earlier post discussing How to build strong research connections? For me the core foundation to building my research leadership brand has been my online presence. It is hard to build up a presence if you do not leave at least some digital trace of your work.

I first created my website in the last century, in 1999 to be exact. Or rather my husband – a software engineer with a PhD in operations research, who likes to observe academia from a safe distance – created it for me. He initially maintained it, but after a few years I learned how to do this myself. I am a bit of a technophobe, but he convinced me that personal websites were going to be very important in academia. Boy was he right!

Free online resources

I first used my website mainly to distribute my teaching materials, but I started adding academic resources quite early. I offered the Journal Quality List in 2000 and the Publish or Perish software in 2006. Both were created for very pragmatic reasons, trying to change the academic system I was working in from below. For details see: Why did you create the JQL and the PoP software? Most academics know me because of these resources rather than because of my research.

I also started a blog more than 8 years ago and I post weekly on all things academia. There are now more than 450 posts, and the blog gets about 100,000 page visits a year. A trivial number compared to social media influencers, but quite respectable for an academic. My website as a whole gets about two million visitors a year, but the bulk of these come for the Publish or Perish software.

So, offering free resources is a very powerful way to build your brand as it draws people to you. Now of course this was never my intention in offering them, it just happened. It probably wouldn’t have happened if brand building had been my primary goal!

Doing research on research

Another thing that helped me in building my research leadership brand is that when I became Research Dean in Australia in 2010, I started doing systematic bibliometric research on data sources such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic and even created new research metrics. Obviously, that gave me some visibility and credibility in that area too.

I have published some fifteen articles in bibliometric journals (see: Free articles on citation analysis and Free articles on (journal) rankings) and am on the editorial board of the key journal in this field: Scientometrics.

After moving back to the UK in 2014, I started focusing on researcher development at Middlesex University. However, rather than keeping all the materials I developed confined within the institution, I shared much of it with others through my website. This allowed me to share practice-based research on how to develop supportive research cultures.

Social media and seminars/webinars

In the past 10 years I have also started engaging very actively with social media, in particular LinkedIn and - until recently - Twitter. During the pandemic I also opened a YouTube channel, which now includes over 200 videos dealing with various aspects of research careers.

This visibility led me to be invited to give regular sessions at the British Academy of Management course for Research Deans, and at various European foundation of Management Development courses. Since the pandemic popularised webinars, I have also been interviewed about aspects related to academic careers and researcher development at least half a dozen times.

How do I find the time for all this?

That’s easy. My motto is to never do something for a reason, but to do it for at least three reasons. That means I consciously decide to spend a bit more time to do something properly, so that I am then able to use it for multiple purposes. As the many external demands on my time multiplied, I have become very good at leveraging my initial investments.

For instance, when I am interviewed, I carefully think about what I want to say and often prepare draft responses. I then split up the interview recording into shorter videos that can be shared on LinkedIn, and create blogposts around these videos, using the text of the recording. Here are a few interviews where I have done this.

The Academic Woman interview in four sections: my career history & advice for juniors, my past and current research, building inclusive research cultures, and research mentorship.
The IB Frontline interview with key researchers in International Business, covering three separate sections: personal, research, and mentoring.
Towards a more inclusive and proactive academia, eight sections covering different elements of an inclusive and proactive academia.
An interview on measuring research impact, discussing the Journal Quality List, the Publish or Perish software, the journal impact factor, h-index, publication strategies, making your case for citation impact, and societal impact.
A Women in AIB interview: covering my first paper, how to publish unusual papers, publishing with a student, my current passions, five lessons I learned from my first publications, factors explaining impactful research, and how to do it?
George State University CIBER interview on Crafting Your Career in Academia: Resources For Early Career Researchers and Beyond, talking about my website, JQL and Publish or Perish, the CYGNA women’s network, my blog and YouTube videos, Positive Academia, my top-3 career tips and mistakes ECRs could avoid.

Presentations and career guides

When I give a presentation face-to-face, I often record it as a PowerPoint presentation afterwards and post it on my YouTube channel. When getting speaking requests I cannot accept, I refer organisers to my YouTube videos. Or I suggest we do a flipped classroom webinar session: the audience watches the video and I do a Q&A. That way I can accept invitations without having to prepare much.

Aug 2022:

Nov 2022:

Feb 2023:

May 2023:

August 2023:

Finally, I have collated many of my blogposts and presentations into career guides that provide a coherent overview of key topics in academia:

Key take-aways

So that’s my 2-cents worth on building your research leadership brand. To re-cap the three key lessons for me have been:

Becoming visible and building a research leadership brand is almost impossible if you only engage face-to-face in the present. At least some of what you do needs to be digitally preserved online for the future. I do this through my website, my blog, social media, and my YouTube channel.
Offering free resources will draw other academics to you and profiles you as someone who is an expert in the area.
Leveraging what you are doing for multiple purposes makes it much easier to manage your workload.

academia behind the scenes positive academia deans social media mentoring research supervision

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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