In Copenhagen this week Richard Smith met Dr Twitter. In London I met Mr LinkedIn. Mark Williams (#mr_linkedin) describes himself as the UK’s leading independent LinkedIn trainer, helping individuals and organisations make the most of the professional network that now boasts 185m members worldwide, including 34,000 doctors at the last count. I went along to ask Williams, who was addressing an audience of publishers, why so many of my connections have started endorsing me lately. More about that later.

But first, some figures. Every second two people join LinkedIn, which was launched by Reid Hoffman in 2003 and is now a vibrant community where make connections, get business, undertake research, and join groups of likeminded professionals. More than half of its members live in the US. India is the second most popular country. It has 6m more members than the UK, but London is the most active city after San Francisco and New York, and Brazil is the fastest growing country. more…

The “publish or perish” model of the academic world has followed a similar pattern since the middle of the last century. It generally takes around seven years from the conception of an idea, to the publishing of a paper, to the point where a critical mass of citations are formally gathered around it.

“Clearly the world moves much, much faster than that now,” argues Andrea Michalek, co-founder of startup Plum Analytics, with researchers posting slides online about their work even before it’s published, and tweets mentioning those discussions and linking back to the content. “All this data exhaust is happening in advance of researchers’ getting those cited-by counts,” she says, and once a paper is published, the opportunities for online references to it grow.

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ResearchGate, a Q&A site that soon became known as ‘Facebook for scientists‘, has announced its intention to function as a publishing platform for scientific researchers and offer an alternative measure of reputation in that community.

Started in 2008 with few features, ResearchGate was reshaped with feedback from scientists and has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook. According to the website, more than 1.9 million scientists currently share papers, publish data and engage in discussions on its platform. Now an ‘RG Score’ has been designed to make those interactions visible and quantifiable.

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As part of the longstanding strategy to position LinkedIn as a marketing platform for brands, a new program has been released that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages. The option is similar to Liking a brand on Facebook or following them on Twitter. Followers will receive automatic updates from the brand through their LinkedIn feeds.

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