Social media for researchers
Social media helps publicise your research activities which leads to greater visibility and discoverability both within and outside your immediate field of expertise.
This guide outlines some recommended social media platforms, channels and methods for academic research dissemination.
Tip: Keep your public and private personae separate.
Which social media platform you use depends in part on what you want to achieve.
- To share/track usage of your publications use:
- To promote your work in detail use:
- To share links to your work through short bites use:
Collaboration platforms allow you to create a profile, share your research publications and connect with fellow researchers or colleagues.
- ResearchGate
- Upload or link to your publications.
- Post-publication peer review.
- Metrics on publication views and downloads.
- ResearchGate score for each researcher.
- Academia.edu
- Research focus.
- Upload your publications.
- Metrics on publication views.
- Mendeley
- Research focus.
- Free reference manager and PDF organiser.
- Track downloads of your work.
- A number of tools, such as Impact Story, use Mendeley data to provide metrics on usage and readership of publications. See the Altmetrics guide for more information.
- LinkedIn
- Create a profile or CV with professional skills, competencies, activities and fields of interest.
- Employment focussed: a significant subset of users are employed in academic or research-oriented institutions.
Blogs allow you to share and describe aspects of your research in more detail than other social networking sites. They are publicly accessible and are a very useful way to promote and increase the visibility of your work. Research blog example: Filling a much-needed gap.
Consider:
- Including an RSS feed so that your followers can receive alerts and an aggregation of your posts.
- Assigning tags to your posts for future reference.
- Allowing readers to make comments and contribute to discussion. If you allow comments on your blog, consider employing a moderating process before comments are made available to the public.
- Linking to open access versions of your work, e.g., within ResearchSpace
Blog platforms:
With a limit of 280 characters, Twitter is useful for sharing and publicising short bites of information.
It is commonly used to draw views to particular pages by including shortened links, e.g., to research publications.
Tweets are useful for engaging in discussion so you can obtain immediate feedback and comments on ideas and papers. They can also be further publicised.
- The London School of Economics Public Policy Group's Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities provides best practice tips and a guide around using Twitter.
Upload a video of a recent interview, speech or conference presentation. You can track views and comments to your upload to gauge reach and interest.
Video sharing sites:
