107 9.17 Scholarly Contributors
While it is easy to understand why it is important for scholars to share their work among themselves, why would scholars want to share their information with you as a communications professional? For one thing, scholars are as eager as anyone else to have their work recognized and appreciated. Taking a call from a reporter or public relations specialist seeking the most reliable “expert” on a particular subject is an ego-boost for the scholar who is used to toiling in relative anonymity in the quiet of the academic or research center environment.
Another motivation for scholars to talk to you is that they might be conducting their work with the help of a grant or financial backing from a foundation or research organization that would appreciate wider distribution of the findings and a larger public audience for the organization’s work.
In fact, it is your job as a communications professional to ask scholars who is supporting their work financially. It is not unusual for scholars to have grants from large companies (pharmaceutical companies, for instance) or government agencies (the U.S. Defense Department, for instance), and the work they do may reflect the interests or priorities of the funding source.
As they have done with many other information niches, Google has created a resource for drilling down into information generated by scholars. Google Scholar describes itself in the following way:
“Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.”
One of the most helpful parts of Google Scholar is the “cited by” feature. If you locate an article of interest you can click on the “cited by” link. This pulls up a list of other articles that referred to the article you are looking at. This can help determine the influence this particular scholar and his/her ideas have had on other scholars and their work. In addition, it can help you locate other scholars you might want to interview.
Any group with a fairly sizable membership usually publishes a directory. The Encyclopedia of Associations is perhaps the best place to begin a search for any type of organization or association. By searching in this directory, you will find the names of the officers and key staff of professional associations. In the past, directories of scholars published by different associations or scholarly societies would have been one of the only resources for locating people who are studying certain topics.
Now, there are a variety of resources that let you tap into networks of scholars and find people with specific academic interests and expertise. Here are two rich resources for finding scholars.
ProfNet.com: Th