social media for researchers -- a personal account

Laboratory of Computational Evolutionary Biology and Genomics

Social Media for Researchers

A personal account

Christophe Dessimozhttp://lab.dessimoz.org

Online identity & social media: What’s in it for me?

• Why spend time/money going to conferences?

http://www.umassmed.edu/Content.aspx?id=103272

Online identity & social media: What’s in it for me?

• Why is publishing in Nature so desirable?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/

Be known (in a good way)• Bad reputation is obviously terrible

• No reputation is initially ok, but

• Good reputation is required latest to get tenure/promotion:

Web and social media for scientists

• Web page: don’t hide from those looking for you

• Twitter: build a communication channel with relevant people

Homepage

Who cares?

• Past colleagues, supervisor, students

• Future colleagues, supervisor, students

• Editors (to ask you to peer-review)

• Potential collaborators

• You: control what people see first when they “google” you

Content?

• Minimum: with full name, affiliation, university email address (!), and a flattering/friendly photo

• Research interests

• Publications (self-archival!)

• Project description

• ...

How?• Ideally, somewhere on

institution website (high pagerank, trustworthy)

• Social networking websitee.g. Mendeley, LinkedIn,ResearchGate

• Wordpress blog, about.me

Check out:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/students/web/personal_website

Twitter

Why bother?

• Stay informed (alert system) about colleagues and relevant work

“Following”➞

• Build up an audience of people interested in your science and your views

“Followers”➞ “Old world” analogy: editor!➞

Effort required by the reader

tweet < blog post << scientific paper

How I use Twitter• Follow interesting folks

• “Star” items that I might want to refer to later

• “Retweet” items of potential interest to my followers(be generous, people love to be retweeted)

• Announce when I travel or give a seminar

• Link to interesting work I come across

• Occasionally engage in discussions

• Slowly build up an audience

Tips

• Don't mix science with “LOLCATS”

• Be respectful of your followers’ time (high signal/noise ratio)

• But be aware that # tweets correlates with # followers

• Start before you need it(as soon as possible!)

Wikipedia

140 characters only so make it count

Job announcements

Published: January 14, 2013

So far Altmetric has seen 17 tweets from 15 accounts with an upper bound of 39,049 combined followers.

!!

"@EBIgoldman: Ever wondered about the maths behind hierarchical orthologous groups?..." All the time.

Case study

951 views ?!

#2 of 18 articlespublished on the same

day in subject area# 1 was covered

by a popular polish blog

951 views ?!

#1 of all 18 articlespublished on the same

day in subject area

4 academic bookmarks ?!

@cdessimoz

http://lab.dessimoz.org

Thank you!

Questions? Comments?