In our first post in this blog series, we introduced the advantages of using altmetrics to curate your digital identity as a researcher. The aim of this post is to look in more detail at how you can do just that, and provide some tips for how to adapt your online activity to successfully promote your research. We also talked to Ethan White, Biology researcher at the University of Florida, and Jacquelyn Gill, Professor of Ecology at the University of Maine, to see what tips they had for our readers.
Blogging
Ethan and Jacquelyn both said they use blogs and Twitter most often to promote their research. Blogs are a really great way to introduce new research and participate in the conversations that are happening in your field. However, the blogosphere is not simply an online space from which to alert the world to your own activities.
Following other blogs, commenting on other people’s posts and including links to other blogs in your posts means you can participate in wider academic discussions, and potentially invite more engagement with your own research. If you create a blog using WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr, you can view and save preferred blogs from the same platform using the built-in “suggested blogs” sections on their sites.
You can also install the free Altmetric bookmarklet to see if anyone has mentioned your own research (or even other research published in your field) in a blog post – simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar and click it while viewing your article on the publisher site to bring up the Altmetric data.
For more blogging tips, this post from Helen Eassom at Wiley has some great suggestions for effective practise.
Maintaining a consistent digital identity
It’s important to be consistent with how you present your identity across different online platforms. For example, you might want to use the same photo across your university faculty page, blog homepage and social media accounts, so that people who might be interested in your research can instantly identify you and verify (for example) your Twitter account against your LinkedIn profile.
Another way of maintaining these connections is to link between platforms when posting. You can do this by sharing your newest blog posts on social media, or including a link to your blog or website in your Twitter bio and faculty page. According to Jacquelyn Gill, “Maintaining visibility on multiple platforms is key! I’ve found Twitter to be an especially great resource in signal-boosting blog posts and new articles. Most other platforms don’t take much work, but it’s always worth putting in the time to keep them up-to-date”.
Networking
Blogs and social media networks can offer the opportunity to engage with people you might not otherwise have had the chance to meet. If (for example) a fellow researcher leaves an interesting comment on one of your blog posts, it should be easy to respond to their comments, and perhaps later locate them on social media to continue the conversation. The people they follow might also be useful contacts to engage with, thereby increasing your own network. If you’re on the conference circuit, it’s always worth following up any talks you give with a link directly to your published research, using the conference hashtag to alert other delegates to your tweet.
As with blogging, the Altmetric bookmarklet can show you who has been sharing both your own work and other outputs published in your discipline via their blogs and on Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo and Google Plus – providing insight into who it might be worth following or reaching out to for additional visibility in future.
Ethan White had lots of interesting things to say about using online platforms to manage and update your professional network. He argued that it’s more useful to think of blogs and social media as tools to create mutually beneficial relationships that support knowledge dissemination.
“Developing a good network of online colleagues will ultimately help you promote your research online more successfully. Think about it this way: if you had a colleague who only ever stopped by your office to tell you that they’d just had a new paper published, you might not be super excited to see them, but if you have a colleague who you talk to about lots of different things, and respect based on their opinions on science in general, then you’d be excited to hear that they had a new idea or had just published a new paper”.
Ethan’s analogy works really well, and suggests that a researcher’s attitude towards online engagement with research is just as important as their practises.
Sharing your own research online
Ensuring you research is as freely accessible as possible can really help raise your profile online. Make a habit of uploading articles to your institutional repository or sharing them amongst academic networks like Mendeley, Zotero or ResearchGate (once they are free of any embargo restrictions, of course), so they can be read by people who may not otherwise have access.
You can also use services such as Figshare to upload and attach unique identifiers to non-article research outputs, such as datasets, posters or images – giving other researchers the opportunity to reuse and build on your work (dependant on your chosen security and copyright preference settings). Once you’ve made your research available, you might like to include links to your outputs from your email signature, institutional faculty page or LinkedIn profile, or even post it to a subject specific forum.
If you’re keen to take it a step further you might like to consider building your own website to showcase your work. There are lots of free platforms available, so this need not be technically daunting – try Wix to help you get started.
Finally… how can I make sure my online activity is picked up by Altmetric?
- If you have a blog, email [email protected] with the homepage and a link to the RSS feed, so we can add it to our list, and start picking up mentions of published research outputs in your posts.
- When blogging about research, make sure you embed a link to the article in the main body of text. Our software ignores headers and footers when scraping a page, so mentions of articles in footnotes don’t get picked up.
- When posting on social media, attach a link to the main article page of the research output on the publisher website, rather than to a PDF.
As always, feel free to give us feedback on this blog post – thanks for reading!
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Psychology, animal welfare, agricultural sustainability, defence analysis, palaeontology, higher education research, neuroscience, toxicology, ecology, nutrition. It’s a diverse list but what brings all these different areas of research together? Every one (plus more) is covered in a list of the 20 original research articles with the highest Altmetric scores, published across Taylor & Francis Group journals.
The sheer diversity of this list highlights the enormous variety of research published, but also shows that any article has the potential to gain attention online; be this via a blog, social media, or picked up by news outlets. We’re an engaged lot and if something fires the imagination (and encourages debate) it’s exciting to see just how quickly the snowball effect can begin. But what makes one journal article get picked up in this way? It’s a magic formula that isn’t always clear – is it subject matter, an effective title, a ‘hot’ topic, renowned authors, or a combination of any, all or none of these?
With Altmetric data recently added to Taylor & Francis Online and CogentOA, we had the opportunity to look at which articles, dating back to January 2012, had the highest Altmetric scores (articles published from this date now feature the Altmetric donut within the journal’s table of contents, on individual article pages and, on Taylor & Francis Online, for all authors within their My Authored Works account). We gathered these together into a ‘top 20’ list. Looking at the final list raised the question ‘why this article over another?’
To try and answer this, I asked the authors featured in the list why they thought their article had gained so much attention. Their responses were varied, and I’ve included just a few snippets here:
“…people are anxious to find out how technology is impacting relationships because its use is so ubiquitous; we are just beginning to uncover the real-life impact of our increased use of technology for communication in our intimate relationships…”
Lori Schade, licensed marriage and family therapist and adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University, Utah and co-author of ‘Using Technology to Connect in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Attachment, Relationship Satisfaction, and Stability in Emerging Adults’ (no.18 in our list)
“…it shows how we can apply our scientific knowledge…to policy forums. This is a type of translational science, applying our scientific knowledge to improving animal welfare and management practices.”
Diana Reiss, Professor, Department of Psychology, City University of New York and co-author of ‘A Veterinary and Behavioral Analysis of Dolphin Killing Methods Currently Used in the “Drive Hunt” in Taiji, Japan’ (no.1 on our list)
“…most people are unaware that this organochlorine compound causes numerous adverse biological effects. The large number of downloads has raised awareness among scientists and the general public about safety and health concerns…”
Susan S. Schiffman, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, North Carolina State University and co-author of ‘Sucralose, A Synthetic Organochlorine Sweetener: Overview Of Biological Issues’ (no.16 in our list)
Reading through their responses, what came across strongly was the importance of ‘real world’ implications for their research. Whether it was on GM crops or cyber attacks, childhood amnesia or the impact of technology on relationships, each of the articles explored a topic relevant to our everyday lives. This list highlights, as I’m going to steal from the excellent Ontario project, that ‘research matters’, not just in the lab or the lecture theatre, at a conference, or when drafting and re-drafting a paper, but in the real world and to real people.
Congratulations, and thank you, to all the authors who featured in the ‘top 20’ and then very kindly sent me their thoughts. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on the list when we run it again next year, but the one thing I do know is that it will be just as diverse again, with just as many ‘real world’ implications and applications. Now that’s what I call impact.
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