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As LinkedIn is a network of professionals, there is a great scope for sharing one's professional expertise in the form of a short piece (or otherwise write something to influence a cause).

Most posts are well researched (often hyperlinked to relevant sources) and reflect the writer's knowledge and experience in a particular professional field.

I am wondering what perceived value is there for this contribution in terms of any academic recognition. Would it be appropriate to list these posts in a job CV?

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    In the corners of academia I'm familiar with, no one uses LinkedIn, and the perceived value of a LinkedIn post is exactly zero.
    – user37208
    Jun 23, 2016 at 23:50
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    This is a reasonable question... but the point is that LinkedIn is a commercial enterprise, so has motivation to include as many people as possible, really regardless of their professional situation. But there's no fact-checking, and no real limit on who can be there, or whether what they say is real or fantasy. Net: nothing. It has no weight.
    – paul garrett
    Jun 23, 2016 at 23:56
  • An ancedote of it's importance: until recently, I thought it was "Linkedln" (last two letters ell en, not i en). I still think that's a better name.
    – Kimball
    Jun 24, 2016 at 0:11
  • ... and, belatedly, one wonders whether one will be sued for defamation.
    – paul garrett
    Jun 24, 2016 at 0:20
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    In my experience, when a researcher starts making posts on LinkedIn, especially if they are substantive posts, it means either that they are temporarily unemployed or that they have left academia and become a consultant. LinkedIn posts seem to be primarily a way to build a network for consulting.
    – Significance
    Jun 24, 2016 at 22:36

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LinkedIn certainly has some value, as a general professional networking tool. However, that value has been declining for quite a while and rather rapidly more recently due to various factors, mainly inability (or lack of care/desire) of LinkedIn's management to manage the quality of the community, provide consistent user experience, fix issues and improve features, just to name a few. Whether the recent acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft will help LinkedIn to remain a major player in the market and improve its dominance or, vice versa, will enable its stagnation and transform it into Microsoft's technology- and talent-focused support division, remains to be seen (I make no bets).

Having said that, the value of LinkedIn from the academic publishing perspective is quite bleak (which is a nice way to say "close to zero"), in my humble opinion. The following are some of the reasons for my such assessment.

  • Quality / scientific rigor. LinkedIn lacks a peer review process, which means that any published piece there should be taken with many more grains of salt than, if such process would be in place (not that is expected).

  • Relevancy. LinkedIn is not very relevant to academia. LinkedIn's network of people from academic circles tend to be much less comprehensive than academia's specialized networks due to some of their colleagues, collaborators, etc. using LinkedIn rarely, if ever, or just not having any presence there at all. Therefore, disseminating scientific information, using LinkedIn, is a much less effective option. Nevertheless, if one has important academic contacts on LinkedIn that are missing from the person's other networks, it might make sense to publish there a brief post (similar to an abstract) with a link to a full-text article (preferably, a DOI link).

  • Information persistence. LinkedIn lacks a mechanism of persistent identifiers (again, not that we can expect that from a general networking platform), which implies lack of guarantee that a link to an article published there will not become broken over time (which jeopardizes scientific information dissemination).

P.S. There is no such term, as "job CV" - I understand what you're trying to say, but IMHO it sounds pretty bad and, thus, I would recommend against using such word combination in any context. HTH

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    Your italicization of random parts of the post is rather strange, in my opinion. It is not clear what purpose it serves.
    – user9646
    Jun 24, 2016 at 7:24
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    @NajibIdrissi: The parts that I italicized might look random to you, but they IMHO represent relatively important aspects that I wanted to emphasize.
    – Aleksandr Blekh
    Jun 24, 2016 at 9:03
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The two major reasons why LinkedIn is not taken seriously by anyone who knows what they are doing are

  1. LinkedIn don't verify what you put on your profile (so possible identity theft, false credentials, etc)
  2. major security flaws (~120 mil accounts were leaked a few weeks back).

Honestly, just stick with your university space or personal website. I know of plenty people who would think that actually using LinkedIn references in your CV is rather unprofessional.

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  • In my experience a link to your LinkedIn profile in your CV is definitely helpful, however referring to individual posts may not be.
    – Joelle Jansen
    Jun 28, 2016 at 20:30

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