Academic Portfolio in the Digital Era: Organizing and Maintaining a Portfolio Using Reference Managers

The academic portfolio has become an integral part of the promotions process. Creating and maintaining an academic portfolio in paper-based or web-based formats can be a cumbersome and time-consuming task. In this article, we describe an alternative way to efficiently organize an academic portfolio using a reference manager software, and discuss some of the afforded advantages. The reference manager software Papers (Mekentosj, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) was used to create an academic portfolio. The article outlines the key steps in creating and maintaining a digital academic portfolio. Using reference manager software (Papers), we created an academic portfolio that allows the user to digitally organize clinical, teaching, and research accomplishments in an indexed library enabling efficient updating, rapid retrieval, and easy sharing. To our knowledge, this is the first digital portfolio of its kind.