Research: Networking and Sharing Sites

With over 31 million academics and 22 million uploaded papers, Academia.edu is a global academic research sharing platform with extensive reach. Members can share research, build relationships with other academics, and grow their professional profile. Basic (free membership) gives access to full-text papers and networking features, a Premium (paid) subscription provides citation tracking and the ability to see who is reading your papers.

1. Sign up to Academia.edu by clicking 'sign up with email', enter your name, email and password.
2. Add your research publications to your profile.
3. Follow people in your field to see their latest updates.

• How to add a paper to your profile

ResearchGate is social networking site designed for academics and scientists to connect with each other, share papers, find collaborators, access job boards, and ask and answer questions. ResearchGate has over 20 million members around the world with a particular focus on connecting and collaborating with colleagues, peers, co-authors and specialists.  

1. Go to researchgate.net and click 'Join for free' and follow the prompts to set up your profile.
2. Add your publications by clicking the 'add publications' button.
3. Personalise your experience by selecting topics to follow.

Be aware that ResearchGate can send you many emails, so it is suggested you customise your email notifications. 

Access the ResearchGate Help Center to find out how to:

• Edit your profile
• Add publications to your profile
• Manage email notifications

Limitations to Academia.edu & ResearchGate

Both Academia.edu and ResearchGate have valuable networking capabilities, yet it is important to be mindful of their limitations.   

• Sharing your research to networking and sharing sites does not meet your institutional or funder obligations  
• Both sites pose the potential of breaching copyright, be sure to read the fine print carefully. 
• Any uploaded content is not guaranteed to be preserved into the future.
• Both sites are known to send large amounts of spam emails
• Personal details may be used by the sites for other purposes 

Federation ResearchOnline

Federation Library encourages all researchers to consider submitting work to Federation ResearchOnline, the University's institutional open access digital research repository.

The aim of  Federation ResearchOnline is to promote, store and provide open access to the research and scholarly output of University staff, students and affiliates.

• Federation Research Online subject guide.

via Canva under licence

The Lens is a not-for-profit, open access global patent and scholarly knowledge resource with over 197 million scholar records. 

The Lens offers free profiles for all authors and inventors, with the capacity to record authorship of scholarly works within the database and the ability to link to your ORCID account.

As a discovery tool The Lens has comprehensive advanced search capacities and data visualisation capacities, making it increasingly popular among academics to find research and data. 

The platform's vast reach and growing popularity has seen many academics create user profiles to promote their research output and build connections with other likeminded researchers. 

• Register to The Lens.
• Lens ORCID Plus Profile Overview
• Lens Boolean Operators Tutorial

Google Scholar is a widely used platform for searching scholarly literature, showing citations to reports, articles, online books and other relevant material. 

Researchers can create a Google scholar profile which allows academics to track who is citing their articles, graph citations over time and compute citation metrics (Google Scholar, 2021). Google Scholar profiles can also be made public so they may be available in author searches on the platform.

• Setting up Google Scholar profiles
• Exploring citations to your articles
   

Twitter is a popular social media platform that can be beneficial before and after publishing any papers, giving researchers the ability to connect with other academics, crowdsource ideas, and promote articles to increase downloads, citations and ultimately impact. Unlike Academica.edu and ResearchGate, Twitter is not dedicated to research which can create more opportunities to promote research beyond traditional circles if used in a directed way. 

The 280-character limit and use of hashtags to allow users to find related content are defining features of Twitter and creates a less formal, more accessible way of communicating to mass audiences.   

• Taylor & Francis guide to Twitter for researchers.

LinkedIn is a business oriented social network, allowing professionals around the world to connect with each other. The platform has a wide audience with close to 740 million members across 200 countries (LinkedIn, 2021). For researchers, LinkedIn is a valuable site for networking with other academics, finding and recruiting participants for research, creating discussion boards, and joining research specific groups to promote work. 

• LinkedIn for academics.