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.
Pests of soyabean_Binomics_IdentificationDr.UPR.pdf
Social Media For Researchers -- A personal account
1. Laboratory of Computational Evolutionary
Biology and Genomics
Social Media for
Researchers
A personal account
Christophe Dessimoz
http://lab.dessimoz.org
2. 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
3. Online identity & social
media: What’s in it for me?
• Why is publishing in Nature so desirable?
4. Be known (in a good way)
• Bad reputation is obviously terrible
• No reputation is initially ok, but
• Good reputation is required latest to get
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/ho
w-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/
tenure/promotion:
5. Web and social media
for scientists
• Web page: don’t hide from those looking for you
• Twitter: build a communication channel with
relevant people
7. 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
8. Content?
• Minimum: with full name, affiliation, university
email address (!), and a flattering/friendly photo
• Research interests
• Publications (self-archival!)
• Project description
• ...
9. How?
• Ideally, somewhere on
institution website (high
pagerank, trustworthy)
• Social networking website
e.g. Mendeley, LinkedIn,
ResearchGate
• Wordpress blog, about.me
Check out:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/students/web/personal_website
11. 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!
13. 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
14. 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
17. Case study
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.
18. 951 views ?!
#2 of 18 articles
published on the same
day in subject area
# 1 was covered
by a popular polish
blog