Many times it is useful to keep researcher interaction confined to the front-end of your ELN and not expose them to the WordPress administration area. This can be good for security and also to minimize confusion from the research’s perspective. In these cases, a social network plugin like BuddyPress or BuddyBoss can also be helpful so that the individual researcher can have a personal profile area for their specific interests and interactions.
The Custom Profile Menu for BuddyPress gives you the ability to easily add tabs to the profile area of researchers. The default for this plugin is to show a rich text HTML widget for this tab. But this also opens the ability to show content from many other plugins through the use of short-codes for the other plugins.