Introduction
Many academics are completely disengaged with any kind of online presence, to the extent that they rarely even update their university webpages. On the reverse side of the coin are highly online academics, who may not only have active social media presences on all the major platforms, but have e.g. personal and academic blogs, websites and streams. This latter profile is still not so common, but increasingly academics are engaging with the internet in various ways that extend past just using it to find research papers.
There are quite a lot of advantages to having at least a minimal online presence at any career stage, including increased networking and career progression opportunities, although higher levels of involvement can also run the risk of being a significant distraction or a lot of additional work. The balance of usefulness/involvement is basically something everyone has to work out on their own, but I have some recommendations, particularly for a “minimal” level of engagement online in a professional academic context, as well as some personal opinions about each of the possible online platforms.
Institutional websites
This is your professional affiliation and often one of the first places potential employers will look. If you Google yourself this may often be the first result, as institutional websites are more highly weighted in search engines. Hence, this is a good place to put links out to other information or sites that you have more control over, since curating institutional websites is often out of your hands, particularly with regards to formatting etc. Make the most of it!
Personal websites
These are actually great in my opinion as a potential employer and editor. You have the chance to really present yourself as a person along with your academic profile. On the other hand this is a fair bit of work to keep up to date, and if you aren’t already engaged with any online platforms or communities it may be hard for people to find this website. There are a lot of free platforms for this as well as online advice, and because I don’t have much experience with this I recommend that if you’re thinking of putting one together that you do a bit of research/find some recommendations online. The Thesis Whisperer (https://thesiswhisperer.com/) is full of great advice and links to different resources and may be a helpful starting point.
Purely academic online platforms
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is very widely used in English-speaking countries for academic profiles, and is becoming increasingly used in different languages and internationally as well. I recommend everyone set up a Google Scholar account as soon as they have one or two paper publications of whatever type.
- Advantages: high visibility, institutional validity, allows quick assessment of your publications by possible academic employers, widely used to select reviewers for papers, automatically tracks all citation metrics that can then be used for CV or to support impact of various papers (e.g. you can say things like “my paper was published last year but has already been cited 10 times; Google Scholar 15/10/2020”), updates totally automatically on demand so requires no further input after set up, can also be used to set up publication or citation alerts which send you an email when e.g. one of your papers is cited, someone in your field publishes a paper, or when a paper is published that contains a certain keyword. It also really does a great job of finding and adding papers as soon as they are published online, before they get a volume, issue and page number: this alone is worth a lot because other systems wait until final publication, which can be sometimes a year later (terrible for junior academics who want to show these off to potential employers).
- Disadvantages: linked to Google (although a gmail account is not required), not common in some parts of the world (e.g. China where Google is mostly throttled in bandwidth or blocked entirely), and can also accidentally add papers that don’t belong to you or that aren’t actual papers by mistake (needs to be occasionally checked manually for this; tends to do worst with common names).
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
ORCID is basically a system of assigning each individual researcher a unique ID number and account. It can even merge publications under different names if you tell it which publications are yours, and if you have a common name it is extremely useful to make sure that your publications are recognised as belonging to you and not someone else, and that someone else’s publications aren’t lumped in with yours. Increasingly, journals are actually demanding that at least corresponding authors get an ORCID before submitting papers.
- Advantages: Can uniquely identify authors, acts as a cross-journal log in platform so you don’t need to remember multiple journal account details, can act as a basic CV online (possible to input some information on the home page), is a free, easy-to-access, open non-profit platform
- Disadvantages: Doesn’t actually provide much extra value other than that stated on the packet: what you see is what you get, it’s a platform for uniquely identifying authors and associating their publications with them. It also doesn’t have as good a publication finding and automated update system as Google, although it’s quite stringent (it rarely includes things that aren’t journal publications).
ResearcherID
This is basically ORCID but proprietary to Thomson Reuters. Historically it was considered more reputable than Google Scholar, although in the last few years the Google Scholar algorithm has improved so much that in my personal opinion this platform is now redundant, although it does have a few points going for it. I wouldn’t bother getting one personally though unless you have to (e.g. if a job ad specifically requests information from it – this happened to me before).
- Advantages: provides more comprehensive metrics on citations than Google Scholar, e.g. also allows you to eliminate self-cites from your publication citation record. Recently linked to Publons, a platform which allows you to keep track of reviews you do for journals, good reputation
- Disadvantages: just not as widely used or well-known anymore, doesn’t provide any significant advantages over the combination of Google Scholar and ORCID, waits until publications are assigned a volume and page number before adding them or collecting citations from them
ResearchGate
ResearchGate in my opinion is basically academic Facebook, or aspires to be – that or possibly academic LinkedIn. It’s a worthwhile platform in many respects but I don’t tend to engage too heavily with it, just out of personal preference. It has a lot of options: you can add content in many different forms; it not only automatically adds your paper publications but you can set up projects, tell it your group structure, ask and answer questions to a wider academic community, request papers from different authors etc. But it’s a bit spammy (sends lots of content emails and updates if you don’t tell it not to), and gives you “scores” based on social-media-type stuff like how many questions you answer, and not so many senior academics use it that I know of. Personally I only check it every few weeks or so if I remember and send papers to people who request them. I also get emails through it but this is to me a super risky strategy to contact people with – institutional email addresses are much more reliable if available.
- Advantages: very flexible, comprehensive open-source platform to get hold of paper publications, post open-access versions of your own papers, get questions answered and potentially build academic networks (although I wouldn’t recommend it primarily for the latter, LinkedIn and Twitter are better). Allows for project updates, tracks citations, and can show you the relationship between academics and researchers in the same group etc.
- Disadvantages: Frequently under attack for copyright violations, doesn’t really have a good academic reputation, lots of extraneous crap that isn’t really so helpful under most circumstances or is distracting
“Real” (not just academic) social media platforms that are sometimes used for academic purposes
Facebook really needs no introduction for most people, it’s so ubiquitous these days as a means of sharing photos, updates and information with family and friends. Actually though it may turn into a generational phenomenon – although many older people adopted it (often to connect with younger relatives) it’s not very popular with young people these days apparently. Personally I don’t use Facebook for academic purposes at all (mostly I just use it to post baby photos just for family in Australia or to keep in contact with friends in other countries), but some academics I know do use it for posting research updates, and some colleagues I only know through conferences etc. have connected with me on it. In this case it works mostly like twitter, but without the character limits! I have no strong opinions about using Facebook for academia one way or the other, but personally I don’t because my Facebook is not professional (honestly it’s mainly cat and baby photos, plus all my elderly relatives are on it…), and is made up of people I know socially rather than professionally.
As a side note, I will never add anyone in my research group on Facebook because I feel it’s a bit of a violation of privacy (although I will accept any invitations – from my side I don’t care because I mainly just post cat and garden photos publically).
- Advantages: Excellent to reach a wider audience, e.g. for science communication purposes (not just academics). Can start groups of people with similar interests, post content etc., can also choose what is public and private, set up separate pages
- Disadvantages: Definitely seen as more social than professional. If you already have one, both social and professional aspects will probably be really tangled up, so you will have to come up with strategies to separate content you want different people to see. Traditionally not used to share academic content, although this is becoming more common
Twitter (note this section is now partially obsolete, due to recent changes to the platform now known as X, but may also apply to newer platforms such as BlueSky)
Twitter is in my opinion the most useful of the major social media platforms to connect with, particularly for networking purposes, as there is a large, established community of academics on there (including many in our field and related areas) and it’s possible to get a lot of journal paper recommendations, notifications about upcoming conferences, read or be involved in interesting discussions, and see what’s happening in general that you’re interested in. On the other hand engaging with it a lot can also be very distracting. I use it predominantly for professional purposes – I post about our papers and those of our collaborators, as well as other papers I find interesting, and I use it as a combination of newsfeed and way of keeping in touch very lightly with what other academic colleagues are doing. I’ve also live-tweeted conferences a couple of times (provided a running commentary of the talks). I also just follow some science news journalists and other streams that I personally find interesting. Twitter is a bit more “what you put in is what you get out” in many respects – you have to put some work into setting it up and finding people to follow until you are happy with the content in your feed, and it takes a long time to establish a follower base as well. On the other hand people very often post job ads on Twitter that aren’t otherwise advertised except on hard-to-find university websites, and it’s really good as a source of news even if you never post anything.
- Advantages: can connect to a large academic community and network, and find out a lot of information of interest. Good way to advertise yourself and your work, find out about conferences, papers etc. and get to know other people in the worldwide science and research community. Particularly useful for looking for job opportunities/making contacts
- Disadvantages: the content format can take a bit of getting used to, e.g. where everything is in short tweets with links out to other information and there are the different reply, retweet, like functions etc. Everything is public on your profile with limited options to change this. Can also be politically sensitive – very public platform means anyone can see what you write and comment, so expressing contentious opinions can attract abuse.
Other platforms and resources
I have no idea about some other platforms, like Instagram, TikTok etc. I know some of my academic colleagues have YouTube accounts where they post lectures! But I don’t really use YouTube much (although there are some useful videos on there for sure) so I can’t give much of an opinion. I’m definitely not an expert in general, but I thought it might be helpful to offer my opinions on this anyway.
PhD-related advice and other resources (really excellent and comprehensive, also contains links to other sites: https://thesiswhisperer.com/
Twitter:
https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/why-academics-should-use-twitter
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/05/the-young-academics-twitter-conundrum/525924/
PHASE Lab 