What is the academic value of posts on LinkedIn?

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

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.