Social Media to Promote Research: Networks & Profiles

Research networks and profiles sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu can be useful for improving your visibility and building your research network. Typically ResearchGate tends to be used more by those in STEM disciplines and Academia.edu more by those in Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. Both networks allow researchers to add a profile with details of their publications and to follow and connect with other researchers.

Posting the full text of published PDFs of your work on these networking sites may be in breach of some publishers' copyright and licensing agreements so make sure to confirm what is permitted before you share your work.

"Can I upload my research to ResearchGate or Academia.edu to make it open access?"

A scholarly network such as ResearchGate is not the same as an open access repository e.g. Research Repository UCD. Commercial scholarly networks do not provide a long-term environment for your papers and uploading PDFs of publications may also infringe publishers’ copyright policies.

We recommend uploading the final peer-reviewed draft to Research Repository UCD and linking to this from third-party services such as ResearchGate.

Google Scholar Citations allows researchers to create their own Google Scholar Profile to increase their visibility, and also to track citations to their publications on Google Scholar. You can also make your profile public, so that it appears at the top of the Google Scholar results page when people search for your name.

You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time. 

You need to have a Google Account to use My Citations. On the Google Scholar page click on the My Citations icon along the top to set up your profile.

Whilst Facebook is not particularly useful for connecting with other researchers on professional contacts, it can be useful for getting ideas of content than engages the general public which can be useful for science communication. It can be helpful to follow the Facebook pages of funding agencies, publishers and other professional organisations and bodies, to see examples of videos, images and other material that generates interest and attention from the general population.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site so can be a useful way of connecting with those outside academia, for example, industry, policy-makers, and the media. Although it is not aimed specifically at researchers, you can add publications, presentation slides and other content to your profile, to help increase the visibility of your output.