Research dissemination: what's happening, what's missing, what's next? (ARMS 2018)
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Strategic dissemination is key to successful creation, recording and communication of engagement and impact, but currently “guidance provided to researchers [about dissemination] is too general ... there is almost no training and few tools provided to research managers and administrators" (Phipps et al, JRA XLVII:2). Individual institutions provide a range of supporting services and systems, but researchers still tend towards systems and behaviours that transcend institutional boundaries (for example, using ResearchGate rather than institutional repositories to promote publications). A further challenge is capturing / comparing data to evaluate activities and channels and make evidence-based decisions about future strategies. Building on our previous work looking at researchers’ reputation management and sharing behaviours, we here present our latest research exploring attitudes towards and experiences of collaborative dissemination, and with insights into the tools or processes that would help researchers to collaborate with each other, and with research managers / administrators, in more effectively planning, managing and measuring dissemination.
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Research dissemination: what's happening, what's missing, what's next? (ARMS 2018)
- 1. Research dissemination: what’s happening, what’s missing, what’s next? Charlie Rapple Co-founder, Kudos (dissemination management platform) @charlierapple @growkudos #ARMS2018 • Hobart • Table 18
- 2. 2 You say communications I say outreach You say dissemination I say engagement
- 3. 3 Dissemination /dɪˌsɛmɪˈneɪʃn/ telling people about your work
- 4. 4 Telling people about your work
- 5. 5 Telling people about your work
- 6. 6 Telling people about your work
- 7. 7 Telling people about your work
- 8. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Conferences / meetings Academic networking / profile sites (e.g.… Conversations with colleagues Institutional websites / repositories Email Social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter,… Your own blog / website Subject-based websites / repositories (e.g. arXiv,… Posts on other blogs / websites Discussion lists Multimedia sharing sites (e.g. Slideshare, YouTube) In which of the following ways do you currently create awareness of or share materials relating to your work? (n = 2,826)
- 9. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Conferences / meetings Academic networking / profile sites (e.g.… Conversations with colleagues Institutional websites / repositories Email Social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter,… Your own blog / website Subject-based websites / repositories (e.g. arXiv,… Posts on other blogs / websites Discussion lists Multimedia sharing sites (e.g. Slideshare, YouTube) In which of the following ways do you currently create awareness of or share materials relating to your work? (n = 2,826) Potential for broader audience Really “just” an academic audience
- 10. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Conferences / meetings Academic networking / profile sites (e.g.… Conversations with colleagues Institutional websites / repositories Email Social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter,… Your own blog / website Subject-based websites / repositories (e.g. arXiv,… Posts on other blogs / websites Discussion lists Multimedia sharing sites (e.g. Slideshare, YouTube) In which of the following ways do you currently create awareness of or share materials relating to your work? (n = 2,826) Digitally visible Offline / private
- 11. 11 0% 30% 60% 90% Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Others # publications with share actions in Kudos n = 4,610 Publication can be shared in more than one channel Facebook is more commonly used for sharing academic work than you might expect Channels used %ofpublicationssharedinthischannel
- 12. Use of scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) ResearchGate n = 6,213 Academia.edu n = 4,629 MyScienceWork n = 261 Mendeley n = 3,168 Humanities Commons n = 142 Social Science Research Network n = 812 Profology n = 22 Trellis n = 92 Daily Weekly Monthly Quarterly 1-2 x year Never
- 13. 13 To access copies of articles / books / chapters that I cannot access elsewhere 66% To find and connect with other researchers 61% To check metrics for my publications 59% To upload copies of my publications (articles / books / chapters etc) 57% Figures taken from survey by Kudos and 10 publisher partners; 2017; n = 6,293 Use of scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs)
- 14. 14 Better understanding the prevalence and effectiveness of “below the waterline” dissemination activities to determine whether they are indeed more common / more effective
- 15. 15 Using data more effectively Capturing, analyzing and applying intelligence about which channels are most effective for reaching different audiences – turning dissemination planning into a science in itself
- 16. 16 More details about our plans in these areas: Friday, 10:30, plenary auditorium Table 18 in the exhibition www.growkudos.com charlie@growkudos.com
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone – I’m Charlie Rapple, and I’m one of the founders of Kudos, which is a platform for helping researchers and their colleagues to manage dissemination more strategically and in a more evidence-based way. Increasing the visibility and reach of research is my passion and my job (lucky me!) and so I’m involved in a lot of studies where we’re exploring attitudes and practices around dissemination, and it’s the findings from some of those projects that I’m sharing with you today.
- And before I even really get started, I just wanted to talk about the word “dissemination”. Because in different contexts, and different countries, it’s used differently, and sometimes what I intend by using the word “dissemination” is not what is understood by the person I’m talking to, who would use a different word for what I’m trying to say.
- So for the purposes of today I’m going to use the word “dissemination”, and I’m going to use it in a catch-all sense, to mean Telling people about your work. Or discussing your work with people. Or involving people in your work. There are so many things researchers do to tell people about their work, or engage people with their work, or disseminate their findings:
- They do conference posters – they publish, articles or books, or working papers, or theses – they issue press releases – they undertake consultancy – they give invited keynotes – they put together project websites or institutional websites – they talk at museums – or participate in science fairs – use sites like ResearchGate or Academia.edu – they send emails – they use social media – they visit schools – they create infographics or other visual summaries – they run workshops – they give interviews – they promote their work online – via blogs – they partner with industry – they make videos – they even take out advertising. Image credits: VectorStock, Flaticon, Shareicon, Freepik Share a coded link to a work or collection profile page via social media/blog Share a coded link to a work or collection profile page via email, listserv or webpage Share a work or collection profile PDF to an SCN Listing on Kudos showcase (works and personal profile) Feature on Kudos showcase (works, collections, personal and group profile) Feature policy briefing on Showcase policy portal Feature press briefing on Showcase media portal Feature industry briefing on Showcase industry portal Create a work or collection profile page Create a policy briefing for a work or collection Create a press briefing for a work or collection Create an industry briefing for a work or collection Buy a video/infographic/poster/editorial services Present a paper at a conference Present a poster at a conference Give a keynote at a conference Media interview Give a talk presentation at an event Run workshop Conduct a consultation Add keywords to work or collection profile page Buy Google adwords for work or collection
- Lots of these things are supported by institutions
- Some might be led more by the project manager or communications lead
- Others might be led more by individuals themselves, and I’m interested in all of these things, and particularly in two framings of all these activities: firstly, the intersection between all the different things that institutions, groups, or individuals do, and the extent to which they build on each others’ efforts, vs the extent to which they are each working in silos. And secondly, not unrelated, I’m really interested in surfacing the less digital communications that people undertake, the things that are often the most common activities and channels for dissemination, and that instinctively we often think are the most effective, and yet that often are the least easy to track or measure.
- This data is from a project I undertook in 2016. I did an online survey, which was completed by about 3,000 researchers, and I asked them among other things about what kinds of things they would do to create awareness of, or share materials relating to, their work – so I was asking them about dissemination and engagement, but without constraining their thinking by using those terms! You can see that the most common way in which people were disseminating their work was via conferences, but it’s interesting that academic networking and profile sites (such as ResearchGate) are just a couple of percentage points ‘behind’ in terms of the proportion of respondents that are using those sites as channels for circulating their work, and I’ll talk more about those sites in a moment. But meanwhile, here, we see: conversations with colleagues, institutional websites or repositories, email (note that email discussion lists is separate, and further down), social media, blogs and personal websites, subject-based sites and repositories, posts on other people’s blogs or websites, and multimedia sharing sites. And I think there are two interesting lenses through which to consider this data further. Firstly, the audiences that will typically be reached by each of these channels, or that the researcher might be targeting with each of these channels, and Secondly, the digital visibility of each of these channels and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment.
- If we look firstly at the audiences reached or targeted, at the most basic level, I’ve switched up the colours here to show academic vs non-academic or broader audiences. I’ve used orange to show that a particular dissemination channel has the potential to reach a broader audience beyond academia. And I’ve used blue to indicate that a particular dissemination channel is most likely to be reaching “just” an academic audience. And I’ve tried to be generous in my interpretation of what has potential to reach a broader audience But really I couldn’t bring myself to colour the bars for institutional websites and repositories, and for academics’ emails, to be completely orange for a broader audience, because I suspect that although those channels do have potential to reach a broader audience, the way they are used probably means that actually they are primarily targeting an academic audience. So I’ve done those bars in these disgustingly garish orange and blue stripes. And what I’m taking away from this is just how few of the most commonly used channels do have potential for reaching a broader audience, or to put that the other way around, the channels that have the potential for broader audiences are the least used. I think there is still a challenge around how to ask this question in a way that is not going to distort the results, and my plan at this point is to repeat this research and rework some of the questions to better surface the wider range of channels that I referred to a moment ago in the slides with all the icons in circles – to make sure that things like science fairs and museum talks are getting “properly” surfaced.
- But even if things like that – talks, workshops, visits to schools or corporate engagement – even if all of those things were being reflected “properly” in these graphs, this one wouldn’t look much better. So here, I switched up the colours to show those forms of dissemination that are “digitally visible” – things that you could track down in retrospect, things you could measure using services like altmetrics, things that are easily logged and counted in an automated way – those are in green; meanwhile in yellow, we have the types of dissemination that people do that are really under the radar; the things that don’t automatically generate a nice record of their existence, or the engagement with them – so if an academic sends an email to a policy maker, it’s only possible to capture the evidence or the results of that if you have access to that academic’s mail client, and if the conversation is tagged such that you can track it and interpret its outcome. Or perhaps, a bit more simple to get your head round, even if they are using a digital medium, like .. Facebook, being able to log a posting on a private Facebook page, or knowing how many people actually clicked through on a link in a post about someone’s work, and how many people went to view or act on more information about that project – that’s really difficult – even though it’s digital, it’s private.
- And as an aside, perhaps, but an important one, one of the things we’ve found since starting Kudos 5 years ago, is that Facebook is much more commonly used for sharing academic work than you might expect. I was taken aback to learn that, as you might expect academics to use Facebook more for personal updates than for posting about their work. The boundaries between professional and personal networks are blurring. Which is why I wanted to emphasise this point about private vs open channels. Given that people’s personal Facebook pages and posts are private, a high proportion of how people disseminate is happening in channels where the fact of that sharing has been hard to monitor, let alone its effect.
- And that is true also of sharing via channels such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu, for which I’ve adopted this term “SCN” which stands for scholarly collaboration network. Scholarly collaboration networks are kind of walled gardens, in that their focus is on building up connections between academics and disseminating outputs within academia, but they are indexed by Google and because of their sheer size, ResearchGate and Academia.edu in particular are now very visible to broader audiences using Google to explore topics of interest. This data is from a project I did last year, and this was a survey with over 7,500 academic respondents. In this project, we asked people about which scholarly collaboration networks they use, and how often. Red here is daily, then orange through yellow reflects weekly, monthly or quarterly, then finally in grey and blue, once or twice a year and never A previous question asked people which networks they were familiar with, and then they were only asked to give a frequency of usage for those networks. So you can see here that ResearchGate, Academia and Mendeley are the most commonly used networks, in terms of the number of people that were familiar with them, But usage of ResearchGate is substantially more frequent, with over a quarter of ResearchGate users in this survey indicating that they use the site at least daily, and another 41% indicating that they use the site at least weekly, 18% at least monthly (so in total: 85% using the site at least monthly).
- And when I asked people what they do with these scholarly collaboration networks, they’re clearly a big part of people’s dissemination efforts – you can see here that 57% of respondents were uploading copies of their work to these sites. And again, this is invisible activity.
- So in conclusion, and in thinking about “what’s next”, having looked at “what’s happening” and “what’s missing”, I think that the next area of development and progress in relation to research dissemination will be better management and tracking of the full range of people’s communications efforts – not just the bits that are easiest to track -
- so that we can better determine which kinds of activities and channels to use more, and which to use less, for different audiences.
- If you’d be interested in learning more about what my colleagues and I are working on in this area, I’ll be talking again tomorrow morning at 10:30, and you can also find me in the exhibition at table 18. Thank you!