Chapter 11 · Every screen, part by part
A professor's page
Everything known about one person, and everything that has been produced from it.
1 — Name, appointment, and trust. The name, then two badges. Tenure-track is the appointment type. Verified is the trust state of the record — it means the claims here have been checked against the sources they cite, by a different agent from the one that found them. An unbadged record has not been through that.
Underneath: their current title and university, both links.
2 — What you can do from here.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Score the match | Compares your profile against this record and produces a fit score, a dimension breakdown, and connection angles |
| Ask about this | Hands you a prompt for asking your assistant about this person, using what is already recorded rather than starting a research run |
| Edit | Opens the drawer for the fields you are allowed to change by hand |
3 — The recruiting banner. Only appears when there is something to say, and it is the most decision-relevant thing on the page. Not recruiting with "they say so themselves" means the claim came from their own page — which outranks any fit score, because a 92 you cannot write to is not an answer. Never checked underneath tells you the age of that claim.
4 — The tabs. Each holds a different kind of thing:
| Tab | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Overview | The facts: title, appointment, rank, department, field, links |
| Research | What they work on, in their own framing |
| Publications | Recent papers where they lead, with what each contributed |
| Match | The fit score and its dimension breakdown |
| Why | The case for writing to them, in three lengths |
| Contribute | What could be built on in their work, and what you could offer |
| Questions | Questions you could propose, phrased as something to explore together |
| Prepare | The call, the funding reality, your statement, and follow-ups |
| Drafts, formal and informal | |
| Outreach | The conversation, once one exists |
5 — Appointment. The kind of post they hold, normalized to a fixed vocabulary so it can be filtered and compared. The raw string from whatever roster it came from is kept underneath the normalization, not thrown away.
6 — Rank. Seniority — assistant, associate, full, distinguished chair — again
normalized. — means it has not been established. This is not the same as appointment,
and the two are stored separately because a university's own directory frequently conflates
them.
7 — Admin roles. Anything like a deanship, department chair or centre directorship. Worth knowing before you write: somebody running a department has less time, and it changes what you would reasonably ask of them.
8 — Research. Whether research will run for this person, and why. Three values:
- Follow rule — no decision has been made about them; Settings → Research Batches decides.
- Research — always research them, whatever their appointment says.
- Skip — never research them, whatever their appointment says.
The sentence underneath is the part worth reading. In the picture it explains that nobody has researched this professor yet, so the rules do not apply to them at all — their appointment came from an imported roster and has not been checked against a faculty page. That is deliberate: nobody is skipped before they have been looked at, because the label an imported roster carries is exactly the thing that is not yet trustworthy.
Further down the Overview tab#
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Department, College | Where they sit inside the institution |
| Field | Their area, in full |
| Research fields | The specific topics, as a list |
| Links | Faculty page, personal page, Scholar, ORCID, LinkedIn, GitHub |
| Their address, if found |