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.

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.

Comments

Grab the opportunity and Promote yourself!

Yes! Grab any opportunity. Funding opportunities and potential funding sources like Reseacrh Professional webpage and Euraxess are necessary for starting, being productive and completing a PhD project. I signed up Research Professional and I started to look for research funding opportunities in my field. Creating and maintaining a personal website is an amazing opportunity to promote yourself, tell the world who you are, what you do what your mission and your GOALS. A standalone website could definitely reflect your personality and your achievements better than any other social media like LinkedIn or Twitter. Creating my own Website could be included in my long-term plans (goals?). Until then I can promote my research work through a cohesive and up-to-date LinkedIn profile. Also, I am currently completing my profile page at surrey.ac.uk. Learning how to promote yourself and how to grab an OPPORTUNITY is a skill that you should develop and train while in your PhD ...

Online means...

Looking at Wikipedia, exploring images online and finding presentations and podacsts are all things that I have met throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. In particular, Wikipedia can be used as the starting point for many research and assignment topics. The information and sources, included in Wikipedia, are accurate and comprehensive. Wikipedia can provide a broad amount of content in the field of Psychology. Regarding the subject directly related to my research, the content was limited. However, Wikipedia is definitely a useful tool for providing the basic information about my project. As regards to the online images, I prefer google searching, Pinterest and Flickr focusing on these images that involve CC license. Furthermore, Instagram and Flickr are also useful for free sharing photos in public. In the course of my studies, I have used many times Power point and Prezi to present my research work at the University and Conferences. I have not used Podcast y...

To conclude...

And now this the time to summarise all these different Things (22?) that I learned through The 23 Things for Research Programme. As a whole, I believe the programme was very insightful and I would definitely recommend it to anyone starting a PhD. Building or improving your professional online presence is the secret of the success. Maybe yes, maybe no... Who knows? Throughout this programme, I developed a cohesive and up-to-date profile in LinkedIn and Researchgate. The programme helped me to think about my personal brand, to set up Mendeley, my Reference Management tool and to recognise the importance of other tools for exploring source of information (Wikipedia), images online (Flickr, Pinterest), sharing findings (Prezi Google Public Data Explorer), disseminating research work (Open Access), maximising research impact (Bibliometrics and Altmetrics), connecting with other researchers (Webinars, Hangouts, Doodle), sharing data (Google Drive), searching for funding (Research ...

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