Talk About Psychology

LinkedIn ResearchGate and Academia.edu…. an online game of networking? Updating my LinkedIn and Reasearchgate profile, personalizing my URL and following tips on how to avoid common mistakes made me feel that I had to sell myself online. This social-media ‘refresh’ was definitely useful but I started to get more sceptical about the benefits of this kind of networking. Undoubtedly, LinkedIn and ResearchGate can offer you a professional persona, an easy way to display your CV, share your work and find other people with similar interests to you. However, the extent to which LinkedIn will be useful to PhD students or individual researchers depends on the researchers’ purposes. If the purpose is to promote research work, then LinkedIn alone will not suffice. Maybe Researchgate is more appropriate in conjunction with other tools like Academia or Mendeley. But the activity and membership vary from one site to another and from one discipline to another so researchers will need to

The experience of taking a look of my online presence was a little bit 'strange' as I was curious about what I could come up. Honestly, exploring my own online profile and thinking of how I could develop my 'personal brand' had never crossed my mind before now. However, living in the digital age means that you build your everyday presence along with your online presence. So, you have just to reconcile yourself with the fact that anyone could have access to your online profile and the only way to handle this is to take action and protect strategically your anonymity. Through the 23 Things for Research, I hope to have the opportunity to consider my online presence on the social platforms and 'curate' my existing online profile in order to keep my professional goals and my individual desires in balance.