'Someone Searched for You': Academia.edu

I have just read this entertaining article (in the Chronicle of HE) by Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham, in which he muses on his experiences with Academia.edu since creating a profile.  (For those who have not encountered this site, the developers describe it thus! -  "Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research")

At the end of the article, Phelps' "personal takeaway"  viz.,  "Academia.edu points toward what universities could offer too—a simple way to make our research easily accessible to the public via links on our own homepages. Maybe some universities do, but none I've ever worked at", led me to think of the all opportunities academics and their institutions have in this digital era of promoting their research by means of such tools, including blogs, Twitter and the like.

The RU Library has a LibGuide dedicated to Academic Networking where a number of sites are linked. A quick search shows that the Rhodes community has a profile out there -  e.g. ResearcherID (70 Rhodes members), ResearchGate (348 RU members) Academia.edu (464 RU members).

With regard to using Twitter to promote your research you might like to read this article in the Guardian (How Twitter will revolutionaise academic research and teaching).