beyond academia: communicating your work in academia and beyond

Communicating Your Work in Academia and Beyond

William Gunn, Ph.D. Head of Academic Outreach Mendeley [email protected]

twitter: @mrgunn

How many of you currently have working outside of academia as

your top choice?

Communicating your work

•Content

•Medium

•Channel

•Audience

My story

The advice I got

• Good: Pick a stable, well-funded lab where people graduate on time

• Good: Diversify project risk

• Bad: Keep your head down, work hard, and it’ll all work out

1. Seek advice from the people who can give it

Lessons

The first transition:

Grad school to Biotech

I was part of something!

It was a little isolating


2. Know Thyself

Lessons

The second transition:

Biotech to tech startup

Early Adopter

...helps researchers work smarter

...makes science more collaborative

and transparent …has created an

open research database

Tools of scientific discovery

Mendeley..

Achievements

• OA policy advocacy successes

• A tool that doesn’t suck

• Altmetrics (Draft NISO standard)

• Reproducibility ($1.3M funding and partnership with Center for Open Science)


2. Know Thyself 3. Look Beyond the Surface

Lessons

Stay

• What do you want to do?

• Will you find "Flow"?

• Realistic impression?

• Supportive network?

• Are you young?

Go

• Frustrated by lack of impact?

• Like to write?

• Want to influence policy?

• Are you too charismatic?

Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.

(1991)

MAKING THE TRANSITION

Team vs. solo


•Content

•Medium – written, spoken, visual

•Channel

•Audience

Data viz has a long history

John Snow’s cholera map helped communicate the idea that cholera was a water-borne disease.

Florence Nightingale used dataviz

Modernization of dataviz

Chart junk: good, bad, and ugly

Which presentation is better?

It can be elegant…

How our eyes and brain perceive

It takes 200 ms to initiate an eye movement, but the red dot can be found in 100 ms or less. This is due to pre-attentive processing.

Shape is a little slower than color!

Pre-attentive processing fails!

There are many “primitive” properties which we perceive

• Length • Width • Size • Density • Hue • Color intensity • Depth • 3-D orientation

Length

Density

Color Intensity

3D orientation

Types of color schemes

• Sequential – suited for ordered data that progress from low to high. Use light colors for low values and dark colors for higher.

• Diverging – uses hue to show the breakpoint and intensity to show divergent extremes.

• Qualitative – uses different colors to represent different categories. Beware of using hue/saturation to highlight unimportant categories.

Sequential

http://colorbrewer2.org/

Diverging

Qualitative

Tips for maps

• Keep it to 5-7 data classes

• ~8% of men are red-green colorblind

• Diverging schemes don’t do well when printed or photocopied

• Colors will often render differently on different screens, especially low-end LCD screens

• http://colorbrewer2.org


•Content

•Medium – written, spoken, visual

•Channel

•Audience

Adams, Jonathan. "Collaborations: the fourth age of research."

Nature 497.7451 (2013): 557-560.

King, Christopher (2012) Thomson Reuters Annual Report

http://ar.thomsonreuters.com/_files/pdf/MultiauthorPapers_ChrisKing.pdf

Social Networks

Opportunities for discovery

Opportunities for building relationships

Scholars on Twitter

In a 2010 survey of ~1,400 higher-ed professionals,

1 of 3 used Twitter (http://scr.bi/9BfKTr)

intro

Prevalence of Twitter citations results

Speed (1)

If I find an interesting reference in

the literature, people will only

know about it after one year,

maybe, after I have actually

published it. However if I tweet it

people will know about it

immediately, as soon as

possible.

results

- 'Tyrone'

Speed (2)

Twitter citations quickly follow article publication:

results

Priem, J. and Costello, K. L. (2010), How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proc. Am.

Soc. Info. Sci. Tech., 47: 1–4. doi: 10.1002/meet.14504701201

2.7M researchers

www.mendeley.com