Introduction to a workshop on: Social Media For Researchers Maximizing your personal impact Alan Cann School of Biological Sciences University of Leicester

1. Social Media For Researchers
Maximizing your personal impact
Alan Cann
School of Biological Sciences
University of Leicester
Find me here: bit.ly/AJCann

2. Social media: A guide for researchers
Cann, Dimitriou
& Hooley (2011)
Social media: A guide
for researchers
Research Information
Network

3. What is Impact?
• “the demonstrable contribution that
excellent research makes to society and
the economy” (RCUK)
• What about personal impact?
• “Continual publishing across journals,
blogs and social media maximises impact
by increasing the size of the „academic
footprint‟ ” (LSE Impact blog)

5. What are social media?

6. Social media for researchers
The “academic research cycle”

8. There is no “right way” but:
• Identification of knowledge
• Creation of knowledge
– more effective collaboration
– opportunities to forge new collaborations
– drawing on expertise to help with research
– receiving feedback as you go
– raising the profile of your work more rapidly than conventional publishing
• Quality assurance of knowledge
– competitive funding
– ethical approval
– academic line-management
– peer scrutiny at conferences
– peer review
– publication
– post-publication review, citation
• Dissemination of knowledge

9. Clay Shirky (2010):
"Participants are different. To participate is to act as
if your presence matters, as if, when you see
something or hear something, your response is part
of the event."

10. It‟s not information
overload, it‟s filter failure

11. Criticisms of social media
• Growth of technology – technodeterminism?
• Privacy
• Banality
• Peripherality
• Loss of an authoritative perspective
• Work/life balance

13. What could possibly go wrong?
• Opening the kimono?
• Ethics?
• Peer review?
• The media?
• And? Murphy‟s Law?
despair.com

14. Making an Impact:
Beyond Citations
The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice

15. alan.cann@le.ac.uk

16. It‟s not about tools, it‟s about
creating the right network
Bad networks!
Good networks!

18. A tale of two networks

19. Workshop:
Your Personal Impact
alan.cann@gmail.com