The Times Higher Education reports today that the ever - increasing amount of social networks aimed at academics wastes time and adds considerable pressure to update the “ overwhelming number of digital academic communities , such as academia.edu , ResearchGate.net and Google Scholar , on which to maintain the impression of a successful and productive researcher . ” It seems there is no clear winner as to which network is to be the Facebook of the academic world , and as such academics are forced to spend time populating lots of different research profiles , hence there are now calls for a centralised profile . T﻿﻿imes Higher Education suggests that one solution to the problem of multiple profiles may be ORCID , an international scheme that assigns a unique identifier to researchers to prevent name mix - ups . Chantelle Rijs, project lead for yet another academic network, Loop, told the 2:AM Amsterdam altmetrics conference on 8 October that academics “do not want to have to populate lots of different types of research profiles”. Researchers can submit their research profile to the network and then sync it with other networks , such as Elsevier ’s Scopus database .
The Times Higher Education reports today that the ever - increasing amount of social networks aimed at academics wastes time and adds considerable pressure to update the “ overwhelming number of digital academic communities , such as academia.edu , ResearchGate.net and Google Scholar , on which to maintain the impression of a successful and productive researcher . ” It seems there is no clear winner as to which network is to be the Facebook of the academic world , and as such academics are forced to spend time populating lots of different research profiles , hence there are now calls for a centralised profile . T﻿﻿imes Higher Education suggests that one solution to the problem of multiple profiles may be ORCID , an international scheme that assigns a unique identifier to researchers to prevent name mix - ups . Researchers can submit their research profile to the network and then sync it with other networks , such as Elsevier ’s Scopus database .