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.

翻译：LinkedIn是全球最大的职业社交网络。因此，它可以架起从业者（其日常工作为软件工程）与研究者（致力于推动软件工程领域发展）之间的桥梁。我们知道这样的隐喻性桥梁确实存在：软件工程研究成果有时会在LinkedIn上被分享，并受到软件从业者的评论。然而，我们尚不清楚这座桥梁的现状。因此，我们通过定量与定性方法，研究了软件工程从业者与研究者如何通过LinkedIn上的公开讨论相互接近，以及双方如何为有效的科学传播做出贡献。我们发现，LinkedIn上关于软件工程研究的帖子中，有相当比例（39%）并非由论文作者撰写。此外，我们的数据集中71%的评论来自行业从业者，但仅有半数帖子至少收到一条评论。基于这些发现，我们为研究者与从业者提出了具体建议，以使在LinkedIn上分享新研究成果更为富有成效。