Research Impact Challenge: 4. Join a Research Community

Research communities are very important for the promotion of your scholarship. Actively participating in one or more will give you ample opportunity to reach the right audience for your work and make it easier for others to discover your work because of the high traffic on their platforms. Finding the right community depends on the discipline and personal interests. Some of the most effective communities are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and Twitter. ResearchGate seems to be more popular for physical sciences, health sciences, and engineering while Academia.edu seems to be more popular for humanities and social sciences. Mendeley and Twitter have no disciplinary inclinations; however, one has to actively investigate to find the right community.

Today's challenge is to make a profile on ReseachGate or Academia.edu.

Thursday Challenge: Join a Research Community

Make a profile on ResearchGate

• Advantages: Improves discoverability of your papers and allows you to discover relevant topics and scholars that you can follow for updates. Supper high traffic, free platform-specific metrics to understand your readers, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with a “Q&A” feature.
• Disadvantages: Takes time to manage, not integrated with other systems to allow easy importing, citation numbers are limited to publications posted on ResearchGate

1. Go to www.researchgate.net and click on "Join for Free" link in the upper right corner, then select the "Academic or Student" option. You can choose to add your institutional affiliation or continue without one.
2. You can add your publications using the "Add new research" or "Add new" blue buttons in the upper right corner.   ResearchGate makes it easy to remember the different types of publications you may have (posters, datasets, etc.). You can also add information on the research projects you are working on.
3. You can choose to make the fulltext document public if you have the rights to post it. Check Sherpa/Romeo for the journal title you published in to determine whether you can post any of the versions of the article. Or, you can post it as private to share it only on request. If you do not have the rights to post it, you can add only the bibliographic information supplemented with a link to the publication. If you have questions about whether your rights to post, please contact us.
4. ResearchGate automatically suggests research interests and connections for you based on who you’ve cited, who you follow and what discipline you selected when setting up your profile.Therefore, the key to creating a robust network is uploading papers with citations to be text-mined and searching for and following other researchers in your field.
5. Searching for other researchers in your field is easy: use the search bar at the top of the screen and type in your colleague’s name. Click on your colleague’s name in the search results to be taken to their profile, where you can explore their publications, co-authors, and so on, and also follow them to receive updates and suggestions for similar scholars.
6. ResearchGate sends emails with statistics each week there is anything to report. It also calculates two types of scores: RGScore - an indicator of your popularity and engagement on the site and  Research Interest - an indicator of interest in your research.
7. To complete this challenge please send us a screenshot of your publications list from your ResearchGate profile.

Make a profile on Academia.edu

• Advantages: Improves discoverability of your papers and allows you to discover relevant topics and scholars that you can follow for updates.
• Disadvantages: Academia.edu has few free features (list of publications and the information on the readership) and it is quite aggressive with their marketing tactics. Takes time to manage, not integrated with other systems to allow easy importing.

1. Go to Academia.edu. You can choose to sign with your Google or Facebook profile, or using your personal or university email address.
2. Once you have created the profile, you can start adding publications using the "Upload" button in the upper right corner.
3. You will be prompted to upload file(s). However, you can upload a publication only if you have the rights to post it since you may have signed away your copyright when published the article with a traditional publisher. Check Sherpa/Romeo for the journal title you published in to determine whether you can post any of the versions of the article (publisher's version or the accepted manuscript). If you have questions about whether your rights to post, please contact us.
4. If you can post your article, continue with uploading the correct version by selecting between the two options, Published Work or Unpublished draft paper. Basic article information will be automatically extracted but you can make any necessary corrections.  To help others find your publication, add keywords in the Research Interest box.
5. If you have no rights to post your article, you can still add it to your profile by adding citation information manually using the "No file to upload?" link under Choose File box.
6. To complete your profile, add your research interests to help others find your publications as well as helping you find publications of your colleagues. Under the Analytics tab, you will be able to see the reach of your publications detailed in the Impact section.
7. To complete this challenge please send us a screenshot of your publications list from your Academia.edu profile.