Episode 9: The new arenas of academic self‑promotion

Here comes the new episode for Thoughts on academic life

There has always been self‑promotion in academia. People mailed offprints, boasted about books, dropped famous names at dinner. But the contemporary landscape is qualitatively different: platformized, metricized, gamified.[6][8]

Academics now operate across multiple, interconnected arenas:

• Citation and profile platforms: Google Scholar, Scopus IDs, ORCID, ResearchGate, Academia.edu.[6][8] You carefully curate your profile, merge stray citations, and silently curse when your name twin in another country contaminates your h‑index. ResearchGate emails your colleagues: “X has a new publication, request full text!” turning your work into a lead‑generation funnel.[7][6]
• Social media stages: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. “Thrilled to announce” has become a literary genre: thrilled to announce my article, my grant, my visiting position, my keynote, my inclusion in some Top 100 list.[8][7] Thread-style posts summarize complex research into algorithm‑friendly chunks, optimized with hashtags for discoverability and altmetric points.[5][6]
• Institutional PR: university newsrooms, press releases, glossy magazines. “Our faculty member ranks in the top 2% of scientists according to [insert obscure list]” becomes a staple headline, easily findable in “academia news” sections like the one on my own blog.[1][3] Complex, cautious findings are alchemized into “Scientists prove X causes Y,” because nuance does not trend.[7]
• Everyday micro‑practices: email signatures listing every role and grant, bios inflated with “internationally recognized expert in…”, strategic mentions of metrics in promotion files and course announcements.[1][5] Even the order of publications on a CV is a carefully curated exhibit in the museum of the self.

None of these practices is neutral. They are shaped by platform architectures that reward certain behaviors and by institutional cultures that quietly equate visibility with worth.[6][5]

Algorithmic visibility: when platforms become your reviewers

In the old model, your main audiences were peers, students, maybe a few policymakers. Now you also have invisible algorithmic audiences deciding who sees what you do.[8][6]

• Social media algorithms reward regular posting, emotional tone, controversy, and engagement—likes, replies, shares.[6][8] Careful, slow, ambiguous arguments are disadvantaged because they are harder to react to quickly.
• Recommendation systems on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and journal portals push already highly cited papers and already prominent authors.[8][6] This is the Matthew effect in software form: success begets success, visibility begets visibility, as Merton’s classic formulation and subsequent studies on cumulative advantage in science have shown.[9][10][11]
• Search engines rank pages based on keywords, backlinks, and SEO practices; institutional web teams learn to engineer this, while individual researchers learn to thread their work with trending buzzwords: “AI,” “climate change,” “misinformation,” “polarization.”[12][6]

Algorithmic visibility is not just a technical layer. It silently defines what counts as “impact.” Altmetrics dashboards now track tweets, news mentions, policy documents, and blog coverage; funding agencies and administrators take these numbers seriously, folding them into their notion of “societal relevance.”[5][6][8]

We thus arrive at a new form of Goodhart’s Law: once “being talked about” becomes a target, we will do things to be more talk‑about‑able, not necessarily more accurate or more careful.[5][6] The platform wants engagement; the university wants impact; the funding agency wants visibility. Between them, the researcher learns to optimize the performance of knowledge rather than knowledge itself.[4][5]

Brand management under precarity

It would be easy to moralize here: “People should stop self‑promoting and let their work speak for itself.” But whose work actually gets to “speak for itself”?

• Precarious lecturers, adjuncts, postdocs, and doctoral candidates are told to “build a profile” because there are few jobs and too many CVs.[8] Social media presence, personal websites, and visible “impact” become survival tools, especially when hiring committees quietly Google candidates.[7][5]
• Scholars from the Global South face structural disadvantages in access to top journals, conferences, and networks. For them, self‑promotion can be a way to circumvent gatekeepers, connect with international peers, and get their work read at all, even if this requires extra unpaid labor across language and platform barriers.[6][8]
• Women and minoritized academics often get punished for the same self‑promotional behavior that is praised in their male or majority peers, as studies of digital harassment and “digital scholarship” careers show.[8] Visible women in particular face harassment, tone‑policing, and accusations of being “self‑centered” or “too loud,” while their less visible work is simultaneously ignored.[8]

In other words, self‑promotion is not just vanity; it is a rational adaptation to a structurally hostile environment.[8] When jobs, grants, and promotions depend on showing “impact” and “excellence,” maintaining an online brand starts to look like part of one’s workload—even if no one pays you for those hours.[5]

Of course, the capacity to play the branding game is itself unevenly distributed. Care responsibilities, heavy teaching loads, weak institutional support, and language barriers mean that some academics can invest in strategic visibility campaigns while others barely keep their heads above water.[8]

The psychic cost of always being “on.”

Beyond inequality and gatekeeping, there is a quieter damage: what this permanent self‑promotion does to our inner lives.

The constant need to display productivity and impact produces a low‑level anxiety: “If I don’t post this paper, it will be invisible; if I don’t announce this grant, people will think I am not doing enough; if I am not constantly in the feed, am I still a serious academic?”

Social media platforms blur the boundaries between work and life. Your feed mixes colleagues’ achievements with friends’ vacation photos and students’ struggles.[6][8] You scroll late at night and feel simultaneously exhausted and inadequate: everyone else seems more productive, more cited, more invited.

This psychic economy is not incidental; it is part of how the platform and the neoliberal university align.[3][5] Both benefit from your inability to log off: the platform harvests your data and engagement, the university harvests your constant self‑documentation as proof of “dynamic academic life,” often showcased in “academia news” feeds like my own.[1][3]

And yet, in this endless exhibition, something important is lost. Space for slow thinking, for projects that might fail, for conversations that are not immediately content. The kind of intellectual life that does not photograph well.

Survival strategies without full capitulation

If the visibility trap is structural, individual strategies cannot fix it. But they can make it more livable—and sometimes resist its worst tendencies.

A few possible practices:

• Strategic minimalism: choose one or two platforms to maintain (for example, a maintained Google Scholar/ORCID profile and one social media account) and ignore the rest.[6] Treat them as infrastructure, not as extensions of your soul.
• Slow metrics: resist the urge to check citation dashboards weekly. Focus on building a coherent body of work and relationships; let numbers lag behind reality instead of dictating it.[10][11]
• Collective visibility: instead of everyone running their own tiny brand, create shared departmental or collective blogs, podcasts, or social media accounts.[1] This distributes attention and reduces individual pressure while still making work accessible.
• Ethical lines: decide in advance what you will not do for visibility—no exaggerated claims, no citation cartels, no ghost or gift authorship, no deliberate provocation just to trend.
• Time boxes: allocate specific, limited windows for “visibility work” (updating profiles, posting about new papers) and protect other times as offline, non‑performative intellectual space.

These are small gestures, not revolutionary acts. But they remind us that we can make choices, however constrained, about how much of ourselves to convert into brand assets.

Footnotes

1. https://erkansaka.net/category/announcements/
3. https://erkansaka.net/2025/12/15/university-rankings-game-measuring-everything/
4. https://erkansaka.net/2026/02/07/tubitakcilik-when-funding-becomes-the-product/
5. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/3/the-use-of-altmetrics-in-promotion-and-tenure
6. https://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745
7. https://academy.pubs.asha.org/2020/10/promoting-your-academic-research-on-social-media/
8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29122503/
9. https://www.scribd.com/document/37514044/Merton-1968-the-Matthew-Effect-in-Science
10. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18625/w18625.pdf
11. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication Files/12-049.pdf
12. https://erkansaka.net/2026/02/28/anthropology-of-ai-black-boxes/