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Follow research, Share knowledge, Find people... but never Sell yourself

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.

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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 explore for themselves all the available options in order to evaluate potential value.
Personally, I would choose to maintain and regularly update my profiles in LinkedIn and Researchgate, but I will definitely need to strike a balance between promoting my work and selling myself online. 
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