Maintaining a Curriculum Vitae (CV) regularly is an important activity for researchers mainly driven by the need to show the impact of his/her research during hiring, promotion, grant application etc. and of course it's a matter of reputation.
Digital technologies offer nice tools/services to compose our CV online, but none of them offer a way to display a comprehensive set of impact metrics, visualizations and rich content in a digital CV, real time. This CV may reside on a researcher's webpage as a living document continuously getting updated.
Key features of this CV could be :
Author name can be followed by an author rank or a metric like h-index.
Education section can have links to thesis, institution website etc. Impact metrics of institution and supervisor may also be displayed. Supervisor's name could be linked to his/her CV.
Published papers section can have conventional article description and display popular impact metrics for research article (citation count, influence on the web etc.), journal (some metric) institution (some metric) and author (some metric). Articles may be hyperlinked to their respective pages in journals. Graphical abstract of the paper, and key entities like chemical structures/genes/proteins may be displayed along with article details. These entities may be hyperlinked to a database. Author names in a research article could be linked to their respective CVs.
Conference section of the CV should have functionality to embed/upload/fetch conference presentations and display beside conference details.
Option to endorse a researcher's skills on the CV may be provided.
Based on initial inputs from the author, the CV composer would be expected to create an initial snapshot and if validated by the author, it can use it's smart algorithms to crawl appropriate locations on the web and carry out author disambiguation, author-article matching etc. to populate the CV regularly. As the CV grows, the algorithms will get better and would be expected to become more accurate and thus facilitate more automated approach to real time CV building.
Export features like creation of a dynamic PDF of the CV, which will be updated real time could be an attractive option in the tool.
Features like co-author map, citation graph, clustering of papers based on research interests of the author etc. can add more punch into the digital CV.
Option to switch off display of some of the features in the CV as and when needed would be a handy feature.
Given the state of digital technology and a rich set of metrics currently available it would be worth exploring the possibility of devising a tool/service which can create a real time CV, one which updates on it's own with minimum intervention from the researcher.
What do you think ? Any tool out there ?
