Social media for researchers
Participation in academic social networks can help raise your visibility and disseminate your research to a wider audience. However, it can be time consuming to be present on all sites so choose one or two that suit your needs and purposes.
Academic social networking sites
In academic social networks you can connect and collaborate with colleagues, peers, co-authors, and experts in your discipline. You can set alerts for received citations or new publications in your research topic, get updates about fellowships and grants in your field and explore potential collaborator for your next research project. On these platforms the content is open to all, which is not the case with Scopus and Web of Science who require an institutional membership to access.
Academia.edu and ResearchGate are well known among researchers. On these sites you may upload your publications, abstracts, and links, and connect to other researchers.
It is your responsibility as an author of a paper to ensure that you have the legal rights to upload your publication to a commercial site such as ResearchGate and Academia. If you are unsure of the copyrights of the paper, please consult Open policy finder and look up the journal you published in. There you will see all the restrictions the publisher has put on your article. If still in doubt, please contact research.lib@chalmers.se for advice.
Maintain a Google scholar profile
Consider registering for a Google Scholar profile to collate your publications and keep track of citations to them. A Google Scholar profile can be viewed as a combination between an author ID and an academic social networking site. If you have a profile on Google Scholar your research output will be at the top of the search results. Once you have created a profile, it is important to maintain it as the automatic updates are not always accurate.
Instructions on how to create and maintain profiles on the most common sites can be found in our guide Be visible in the era of open access and social media (pdf, 1.2 Mb)
