A variety of social networking sites are available for researchers to create public profiles to attract interest in their work, publications and skills. Some of those currently available are identified below. Be alert to the Terms and Conditions of each site and your responsibilities. (Listed in alphabetical order.)
| Platform | Purpose | Benefits | Limitations |
| Academia.edu | Designed for graduate students and academics, as a platform for academics to share research papers, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. | Large membership base. | Known to increase email spam. |
| Figshare | Open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. | Free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data. | |
| Google Scholar Citations Profile | A simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name. | Not a registry. | |
| ImpactStory Profiles | Impactstory is an open-source website that helps researchers explore and share the online impact of their research. | Connect your ORCID to this profile for easy setup. | |
| A popular social networking tool for professionals in all fields. Makes finding people in particular fields of work or with particular affiliations easier. | Known to increase email spam. | ||
| Loop | Loop links researchers to articles on nature.com, in addition to the content on frontiersin.org, making researchers and their work discoverable from multiple independent websites. | ||
| Kudos | Kudos is a web-based service that helps researchers and their institutions and funders to maximize the visibility and impact of their published articles. Kudos provides a platform for assembling and creating information to help search filtering, for sharing information to drive discovery, and for measuring and monitoring the effect of these activities. | It provides a free basic version. | |
| Mendeley | Primarily known as a citation management tool, Mendeley includes a social networking element that allows the sharing of research libraries and tracks downloads and views as an alternative research impact measurement. | ||
| ResearchGate | Similar to Academia.edu, this platform facilitates sharing of research and collaboration with other researchers in your field. Will identify your publications without your assistance. | Very interactive, oriented towards collaboration and discovery | Known to increase spam to your email. |
| VIVO | A discovery tool for researchers, VIVO was developed at Cornell and has now been adopted by numerous academic and research institutions. It aims to provide updated research-focused information about people, organizations, events, publications and funding. |