Why supervisor-first research changes the outcome
In many funded postgraduate routes, admission effectively runs through a person: a supervisor who has a project, a group, or funding, and who is willing to take a student. In those systems an application sent without any contact competes badly against one that arrives with a supervisor already interested. That is why a country pass built around universities alone is incomplete — the institution is the container, the research group is the opportunity.
What Scholar shows you, and what it deliberately does not
| Scholar shows | Scholar will not show |
|---|---|
| The academic's own published research interests, as written on their institutional page | A generated summary or paraphrase of their work |
| Their official faculty profile URL and the date it was last checked | Any profile that cannot be traced to an institutional source |
| An institutional address, where the institution itself publishes one | Personal addresses, phone numbers, or addresses guessed from name patterns |
| Department, field and university context | An invented ranking of how "good" a supervisor is |
| The institution's own wording on whether they are taking students | An assumption that a public profile means they are accepting students |
| Which of your keywords overlapped, spelled out | A percentage chance of acceptance or admission |
How Supervisor Match works
You describe what you want to research. Scholar splits that into terms, compares them against the research interests the academic published themselves, and ranks by how many terms genuinely overlap. Then it tells you which ones matched.
"High alignment" means your words and their words overlap a lot. It does not mean they will reply, that they have funding, or that you would be admitted. Any product that claims to know those things is guessing at your expense.
Contact data: the rules we hold ourselves to
- Only addresses an institution has published on a public page are recorded.
- An address is stored only when its domain matches the profile page it came from. Free-mail addresses are dropped at import.
- Personal phone numbers, home addresses and non-institutional contacts are not collected — the schema has no field for them.
- Every contact record carries the page it came from and the date it was checked, so you can confirm it before sending.
- There is no bulk export of faculty records at any price. There is no mass-mail feature, and there will not be one.
The reason is practical as well as ethical: mass-mailed academic outreach is widely disliked, widely filtered, and actively damages the applicants who send it. A tool that industrialises it would be selling you a worse outcome.
Writing the email
Scholar drafts one email to one academic, assembled from your own profile and their own stated interests, then tracks whether you sent it and whether they replied. It never sends anything for you. The full method is in the guide on emailing a professor for a PhD, and the supervisor-fit reasoning is in research supervisor fit.