Researchers: Visibility & Impact

Benefits of using social media for research purposes are outlined below

Identification of knowledge

• Harness your networks
• Keep up to date with what others are saying

Creation of knowledge

• Share ideas and draw on others for advice
• Develop effective collaboration, forge new collaborations and benefit from experience and expertise of others
• Receive feedback as you go rather than waiting until you reach high stakes moments such as submitting to journals and presenting at conferences 
• Raising the profile of your work more rapidly than conventional academic publishing allows

Dissemination of knowledge

• No barriers to reading and anyone can read your work
• Increased speed of publishing
• Search engines optimise social media platforms

Participating in social media does not mean you have to be a major producer of content. Your participation could be limited to tagging or liking a resource or responding to someone else via Twitter or Facebook.

Google Scholar citations profile

Create a profile and add your publications to enable researchers to find your research more easily.  You can also track citations that your papers have received.

Make the most of your email signature

Add the details of your latest research to your email signature.

Make your research open access

Papers that are available open access can be accessed by anyone and are not hidden behind fee-walls. 

Share your data

Research suggests that including the data underpinning your research can increase readership and citations.  

Network

Networking via conferences and events is an excellent way to raise your profile and get your research known.

Talk to Marketing and Communications

DMU's Marketing and Communications Directorate can advise and help you with promoting your research.  They have access to "the conversation" a service allowing journalists to write articles about your research for news outlets.

Each service offers different functionality and has its own culture.

Check out what your peers are using and choose the most appropriate tools.  Remember, it is often better to do more with less.

Some of the main tools and services are listed below:

Social and professional networking services

Tools that enable groups of people to communicate, publish information about themselves, and build networks and collaborations. Examples include:Facebook; LinkedIn

Researcher-specific social networking services

Networking sites aimed at researchers that enable collaboration and sharing of knowledge.  The sites also enable you to share open access versions of research papers and search for full-text access to other researchers' papers.  Examples include:ResearchGate: Academia

Social bookmarking

Tools that allow you to store, tag, organise, share and search for bookmarks (links) to resources online. Users can see all items that share the same tag and discover resources that may otherwise have been missed.  Examples include: Delicious; Diigo; BibSonomy

Blogging

A type of website maintained by an individual or small group.  Blogs present a mix of opinion, news and other content and the comment feature enables two-way communication.  They can be useful to build your profile as a researcher, gain ideas and help with collaboration and building of networks.  Examples of blogging tools include: Blogger; Wordpress

Microblogging

Microblogs enable small pieces of writing or data to be made available online. They enable you to build up a network of followers and facilitate many-to-many communication through the comments features.  Although they only allow you share a small amount of text, you can use microblogs to share links that point towards more substantial resources. The most well-known example is: Twitter

Citation sharing

Tools that enable you to store and manage references and automatically create bibliographies. You can also share what you are reading with others where copyright allows.  DMU supports RefWorks as its reference management system, but open source tools also exist such as Mendeley and Zotero.

Multimedia sharing networks

These networks allow sharing of multimedia objects. Examples include: Presentations: Slideshare; Photographs: Flickr; Instagram; Video: Vimeo; YouTube.​

A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic

Why do I bother blogging: an academic's perspective