Beyond Self-Promotion: How Software Engineering Research Is Discussed on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world. As such, it can serve to build bridges between practitioners, whose daily work is software engineering (SE), and researchers, who work to advance the field of software engineering. We know that such a metaphorical bridge exists: SE research findings are sometimes shared on LinkedIn and commented on by software practitioners. Yet, we do not know what state the bridge is in. Therefore, we quantitatively and qualitatively investigate how SE practitioners and researchers approach each other via public LinkedIn discussions and what both sides can contribute to effective science communication. We found that a considerable proportion of LinkedIn posts on SE research are written by people who are not the paper authors (39%). Further, 71% of all comments in our dataset are from people in the industry, but only every second post receives at least one comment at all. Based on our findings, we formulate concrete advice for researchers and practitioners to make sharing new research findings on LinkedIn more fruitful.CCS CONCEPTS•Human-centered computing → Social content sharing.LAY ABSTRACTLinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, isn’t just for job hunting—it can also be a place where researchers and practitioners talk about scientific findings. We have looked at such interactions for people with an academic or industry software engineering (SE) background. Surprisingly, 39% of LinkedIn posts discussing SE research aren’t from the researchers themselves. And a whopping 71% of comments on the posts come from industry professionals. Our study offers actionable insights for researchers and practitioners to further enhance LinkedIn discussions for a stronger bridge between creators and innovators in software engineering.