You can use Facebook to set up a profile for your research or research group, allowing more people to discover your research and give you greater exposure. You can use your existing Facebook profile as a Research Profile, simply by creating different contact lists.
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Linkedin is a social network for professionals in which people can create a profile, connect with peers, and network. you can list your publications and other research outputs, experiences, skills and current and past positions. It is great if you are looking for exposure in broader communities, including industry, business or government.
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However, using social media is not without its pitfalls and also raises concerns regarding data privacy. Before signing up to any tools or platforms:
The Can I Share It look-up tool provides academic researchers with an easy way to check where a journal article can be shared in line with the paper’s access and usage rights.
Twitter is a 'microblogging' system that allows you to send and receive short posts called tweets. ... Twitter users follow other users. If you follow someone you can see their tweets in your twitter 'timeline'. You can choose to follow people and organisations with similar academic and personal interests to you.
Selected articles about Twitter in academia
ResearchGate is an academic social network that aims to connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise.ResearchGate automatically helps you create a research network. This is based on the people you have followed, the subject area of your expertise and the reference list of your works uploaded to the platform that have the same set of interests and specializations. You can choose which topics or researchers to follow. You can automatically populate your publications list or add items from reference management tools or add manually. You can even upload and share full-text publications (e.g. last author versions that many publishers allow you to share).
Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
See the video below for information about creating and collaborating in Mendeley groups.
For information on how you can create your research profile on Mendeley, please click here.
Is another multidisciplinary academic networking site, It is good for showcasing publications and provides basic statistics relating to their downloads.