social media for researchers -- a personal account
DESCRIPTION
In this talk, I provide very pragmatic reasons for scientists—particularly early-career ones—to consider joining the social media bandwagon. I also provide a few examples of effective uses of social media.TRANSCRIPT
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
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?