The Digital Scholar: Develop Your Online Presence and Communicate Your Work to the World

Academic Social Networks

Academic social networks can provide some opportunities for meeting others in your field and promoting your work, but please note that they will track your personal data and email you incessantly in exchange.

Can you share it? One important aspect of using a platform like ResearchGate or Academia.edu to post your research is whether you're actually legally allowed to do so. Check your publisher's policies prior to posting with the Sherpa Romeo tool.

ResearchGate

• Research-based for-profit social network
• Founded 2008, headquartered in Berlin
• Free membership (funded by several rounds of investors)
  • Institutional email address required
• Also does: Job listings, profile export into CV
• Now a publishing platform for open access content of some publishers (Sage, Springer Nature, Royal Society of Chemistry)

Academia.edu

• Research-based for-profit social network
• Founded 2008, headquartered in San Francisco
  • Note: Academia.edu's domain was acquired before the .edu domain was restricted to nonprofit educational institutions
• Free basic membership (”upgrade to premium to remove ads”)
  • Premium membership available for a monthly or yearly fee

⚠️ Issues with Academic Social Networks

• Free memberships, lots of funding – where’s the profit?
  • RG: Targeted ads, job postings, publishing platform
  • Academia: premium accounts, job postings
• Spammy invitations, nonstop emailing
• Meaningless metrics
• RG: Fake profiles scraped from citations and personal websites
• Closed access to user data
• Fake open access: purports to be open but is closed only to members, some paying
• Publisher anger and occasional rounds of take-down notices

References

Another Option: LinkedIn

As the social media environment evolves, many researchers have moved to LinkedIn or are increasing their usage of the platform beyond posting their CV to more actively post news and updates about their research.

Consider your personal policies when deciding to use LinkedIn for this purpose:

• How much information about yourself do you feel comfortable sharing?
• Who will you allow to follow you?

Join the Conversation: Academic Discussion Forums

Academics have established spaces in general-interest message board platforms to discuss subjects of interest to those conducting academic research and working in higher education. These discussions allow researchers to check in with their peers for advice, feedback and potential collaboration.

While these platforms are generally available without an account, certain functions are only open to registered users. Before creating an account, be sure to read the privacy policies so you know what the websites will do with your user data.

StackExchange

• Purpose/structure: Question and answer format, with comments following questions and replies.
• Reading/browsing: Open to all.
• Posting: Accounts can be anonymous but you can also create an account under your actual name if you want to promote your research.
  • User interaction: Users votes based on answer quality. Positive votes count toward the poster's "reputation" score, which provides greater visibility when posting.

Reddit

• Purpose/structure: Open-ended discussion, prioritizing new and "hot" posts (with a lot of interaction).
• Reading/browsing: Open to all.
• Posting: Accounts can be anonymous but you can also create an account under your actual name if you want to promote your research.
  • User interaction: Users can vote to reflect personal opinions.

Quora

• Purpose/structure: Question and answer platform.
• Reading: Open to all but not easy to browse new posts when not logged in.
• Posting: Accounts can be linked to Google or Facebook; anonymous profiles allowed as of 2021. Users follow the topics and users of interest to see new question posts in their feed.
  • User interaction: Users can vote for answers they find helpful, which promotes those answers to others.