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I have recently moved away from the town and university where I completed my masters degree to another city for personal reasons. Now I work here in academic information services and part of my work is research.

However, I would like to put a stronger focus on research and concept-level work rather than doing tasks in technical services. To achieve this, I feel I need to do more academic networking outside of work which is quite difficult as my employing institution does not like being mentioned as affiliation in professional networking.

The problem is: How to (re-)start academic networking when I don't really have an institutional or project affiliation?

I know this can be seen as a workplace-related question, but I am specifically interested in academic networking - participate in research discussion groups, maybe get to teach a small Bachelor course related to my work, possibly find a partner for collaboration on a paper... The city I now live in has some universities, but there does not seem to be any connection to the university or institute I graduated in.

I really feel stuck in this situation. Any suggestion on this would be welcome!

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24483
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    Please forgive my ignorance: I don't really know what "academic information services" means. Could you clarify or provide a link or two? (It feels maybe a smidge paradoxical that you are not at liberty to give information to academics about your work in academic information services, but that's probably an artifact of my lack of understanding.) – Pete L. Clark May 30 '16 at 22:51
  • Academic information services cater for the needs of researchers: Access to specialist literature, datasets, open and reproducible research material as well as infrastructures for publication, digital preservation, metadata. It is linked to libraries. – 24483 May 30 '16 at 23:16
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    Thanks for that. A key point seems to be: "...as my employing institution does not like being mentioned as affiliation in professional networking." Could you say why not? I don't see why they wouldn't view your attempts at professional networking positively, rather than negatively. If they really feel that way, it seems like a big negative to your job (maybe look for another?). – Pete L. Clark May 30 '16 at 23:22
  • I think they are worried that my views and actions could be attributed to the institution as a whole, and since I am no higher-level manager, that's not desired. – 24483 May 30 '16 at 23:34
  • Find people and groups relevant to your research interests. Contact the former informally, mentioning your interest and politely asking for potential opportunities for collaboration. Find out about events and meeting schedules of the former and start attending some of the events and networking there (check meetup.com and professional societies' websites for relevant info). In both cases, nobody will require you to use your formal affiliation (though IMHO you should mention your place of work informally). @Significance's advice below is very good as well (+1). – Aleksandr Blekh May 31 '16 at 04:48
  • My own (biased) opinion: active academic networking is overrated (in the theoretical sciences at least). Good scientists are judged based on results/papers. This is how you build your reputation which then leads to networking. – Dilworth May 31 '16 at 11:13
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    my employing institution does not like being mentioned as affiliation in professional networking — That's really really sketchy. You are affiliated with your employing institution. Hiding that fact would be dishonest, no matter what the institution thinks. – JeffE May 31 '16 at 12:58
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    @Dilworth active academic networking is overrated — I strongly disagree. Even in theoretical fields (like mine), networking is important. It's not enough to have good results; you also need other people to sell them for you. Networking is also a good (if not the best) source of problems to work on and collaborators to work with. – JeffE May 31 '16 at 13:00
  • @JeffE, networking might be important, indeed. But active networking, i.e., the initiative to network and talk to a lot of people, irrespective of your own body of work and achievements, leads to scholars whose main feature is networking, and whose main corpus of work is scattered results with many authors (in the best case), and no research identity of their own. So, as I said, you should first be a good researcher, and only afterwords your network will start naturally to form by itself (and not by artificially talking to many people without common grounds). – Dilworth May 31 '16 at 13:57
  • @Dilworth I agree that you need your own research identity, but your network will not naturally form by itself. Networking requires effort. You must reach outside your comfort zone, to discover whether people have common ground for collaboration. Remember that researchers are apes first and researchers second. See also my answer to a related question. – JeffE Jun 01 '16 at 11:05
  • @JeffE, well, I agree that there are some (or even many) researchers that put a lot of emphasis on reaching out to discover whether people have common ground for collaboration. I claim that this model, when done excessively and in an unnatural way, namely, without apriori having common ground is not the optimal model for many researchers, and may result in unoriginal research, over conformity, and lack of research identity. Everything of course should be done in the right balance and I'm not advocating complete isolation, but mild isolation is not always bad. – Dilworth Jun 01 '16 at 11:49

1 Answers1

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  1. Contact the schools doing relevant work and ask to be added to their seminar notification lists. Attend the seminars and participate in discussion afterwards. You needn't mention your affiliation.
  2. Contact the people doing relevant work and offer to present a seminar yourself (if your employer will allow it). Most university schools run seminar series and are always on the lookout for new speakers, especially external speakers. List the affiliation you had when you did the research about which you will be speaking. When they accept your seminar offer, ask if they would also mind scheduling you some time on the same day to speak one-on-one with people working in your field.
  3. If you are in an applied field, look into whether there is an active professional society group in your field in the new city. Join it and attend their events. If there there is no active group, consider starting one: if you are willing to do the leg-work involved in organising a few good seminars, professional networking dinners, entertaining debates or other activities, people will join.
Significance
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