Information Science scholars face a wide range of challenges, such as the increasing pace of technology development and interdisciplinary research. In this special issue, we invite authors to share their professional development experiences and insights to provide inspiration and lessons learned for junior research / early career researchers and practitioners. Such resources are currently lacking and implicit.

Themes and questions of interest for the special issue could be, for example:

• How did you choose an information science career?
• How do you decide whether you go with the academic vs industry route?
• What kinds of soft skills do you think are helpful for an information science career?
• How do you build your network and support system?
• How do you build your professional profile?
• How do you prepare for job interviews?
• How do you balance your academic career and life?
• How do you view and cope with structural issues such as gender/racial bias?
• How did you cope with the toxic relationships in academia if you have experienced them?
• How does geographical location (e.g., North America, Europe, Asia) impact your research practices and career prospects?
• Do you think it is necessary and helpful to have a social media profile to promote visibility?
• How do you deal with criticisms in academic settings, e.g., peer review, job seeking process?
• How do you deal with the heightened competition in academia with your competitors in job-seeking, tenure, or paper publications?

In the special issue, we seek short texts for general audiences, accompanied by personal experiences and perspectives, issues to consider, potential solutions, and your ongoing research or ideas.

Author instructions

All proposals should be submitted directly to the Information Matters platform following the author instructions. Authors are also encouraged to provide illustrations to accompany texts. When submitting your article, make sure to select “Professional Development” as a category.

Pay special attention that in this special issue we are not seeking conventional scholarly papers but short texts (500 to 1000 words) accessible for the general audience. Work that is previously published elsewhere will be considered as long as it is rewritten in the format applicable to Information Matters. The texts will be published in parallel through SSRN in a citable format with a DOI, volume and issue and are indexed in a series of publication databases.

Submission Deadline

Submission Deadline: July 19th, 2024 

Questions

For queries about the special issue, please contact one of the editors (email addresses below).

Editors

• Aylin Imeri, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany ([email protected])
• Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States ([email protected])