Scholar profiles: what belongs, what does not, and who decides

A scholar profile aggregates facts that are individually public into something that did not previously exist as a whole.

That aggregation changes what should reasonably be in it — which is the point most profile designs miss.

What belongs

• Publications and other scholarly outputs.
• Affiliations with date ranges.
• Professional identifiers and links.
• Research areas.
• Professional contact details the scholar has chosen to make public.
• Qualifications, with verification status stated.

What does not

• Personal data unrelated to professional standing — date of birth, home address, family information.
• Sensitive attributes, regardless of availability elsewhere.
• Unverified allegations or open concerns.
• Assessments of quality.
• Contact details the scholar has not made public.

Verification status must be visible

• Verified, self-reported and inferred must be distinguished.
• Show when each was last confirmed.
• Unverified does not mean false — the label must be neutral, since most unverified values are correct.
• Do not present inferred aggregates with the visual weight of verified data.

Control the scholar should have

• See the full record.
• Correct factual errors through a documented route.
• Suppress optional fields.
• Request restriction where visibility poses a risk, without having to explain why publicly.
• Add outputs the registry has not found.

Handling absence

• A sparse profile usually means poor coverage, not low activity.
• Say so explicitly — an empty field read as an empty career does real harm.
• Coverage is worst for local-language and applied output, which affects some researchers far more than others.
• Never present a profile as a complete record of someone's work.

What profiles should not be used for

• Individual assessment — the data cannot support it.
• Ranking researchers.
• Any decision the person cannot see and contest.
• State these limits in the documentation, since users will otherwise assume otherwise.

One thing worth remembering

A sparse profile means poor coverage far more often than low output.

Anyone reading profiles comparatively needs to know that — because the researchers with the sparsest profiles are systematically those publishing in less-indexed venues, not those doing less work.

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