Research Impact Challenge for authors

The value of social media platforms for disseminating your scholarship will vary. Some professions and scholarly communities are active on Twitter, while others may prefer to write and comment on blogs. For some, engaging communities is important; this is often done via Facebook. We recommend that scholars choose where to invest your limited time and effort carefully. In general, go to where people are already connecting and engaging. 

If the groups you are trying to reach - whether researchers, professionals, or communities - are not active on social media, then we generally do not recommend investing lots of time on specific social media platforms. 

Finally, remember that engagement also happens off-line. So don't forget to capture other evidence that people are engaging with and using your work.

Twitter can be an easy and quick way to increase the awareness and reach of your scholarship.

Some basic tips for tweeting about your work:

• It's all about the conversation - retweet others' posts, respond, and tag specific people
• Use hashtags that are commonly used for your topic or by your community
• Include a link to your article, data, code, etc. in your tweet
• Whenever possible, link to an openly accessible copy of your work
• Engage regularly, ideally once per day
• Use tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to make this easier - allow you to schedule tweets, manage multiple accounts, track interactions

Want more tips? 

Cheplygina, V., Hermans, F., Albers, C., Bielczyk, N., & Smeets, I. (2020). Ten simple rules for getting started on Twitter as a scientist. PLoS computational biology, 16(2), e1007513. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007513

While media coverage may not be something that you can control, you can be prepared when opportunities come to you.

• Know your audience
• Identify the goals - what do you want to communicate?
• Prepare layperson-friendly talking points about your work
  • Start with the most important information
  • Why Should I Care? Communicate the "big picture" and why the audience should care. 
  • Stick to three points - What are the three things you want your audience to remember and respond to? Organize your message around these key points.
  • Avoid jargon

Adapted from AAAS Communication Fundamentals

ResearchGate and Academia.edu are both platforms for sharing your publications and a platform to discuss them with other researchers. However, in most cases, the publisher owns the copyright of an article rather than the author. To preserve their profits, publishers have threatened lawsuits and issued take-down notices. This means that a work you spent time uploading and discussing may disappear without any notice. Also, the metrics gathered by these platforms are not easily verified or exported; thus, trust in their validity is low.

A more sustainable (and legally sound) option is to share your publications in IUI ScholarWorks and link to them from whatever social media you prefer to use.

Altmetrics data providers like Altmetric and PlumX capture and aggregate metrics about specific products. Their ability to follow the traces left behind when people interact with scholarly products typically relies on persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI, handle.net, URN, ISBN, etc.). Following those traces can help you understand how people find and engage with your scholarship.

For more information about aggregators, see:

• https://www.altmetric.com/about-our-data/how-it-works-2/
• https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/

For instructions on how to find and gather altmetrics (or social media metrics), see the metrics recipes at https://researchmetrics.iupui.edu/resources.html. 

• Unsure whether people in your field are using social media? Take a few minutes to talk to a few of your colleagues - both senior and junior - about where they share and find research. 
• Have a Twitter account? Choose one or more of the following:
  • Find a new conversation by searching for hashtags about a new topic of interest or an emerging issue relevant to your work
  • Find two new people to follow who have related interests, but who are not in your field. Following a diverse group of people can expose you to new ideas or new perspectives.
• Scholarly blogs are fewer in number than they used to be, but some scholars are still connecting on platforms like Medium, The Conversation, and personal websites. While these may not be strictly social media, they are platforms that allow you to connect and engage with a variety of readers. 
  • Search Medium or The Conversation for topics that interest you. Consider whether either of these platforms would be a good fit for your work. If not, is there another place where you could talk about and engage people in a discussion about your work in a less scholarly way?