We live in an age of information with research being published in volumes and at speeds never before seen. Unfortunately, with so many new scholarly publishing venues and databases, there is no one database that can access all research. For professional researchers, this is a problem: we all want to increase our research visibility and impact, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
Or more precisely, using the traditional means of publishing in scholarly journals and conference proceedings to increase research visibility and impact is becoming increasingly difficult.
The good news is that social media (SM) platforms and strategies, or Social Media for Academic Purposes (SMAP), can be solutions.
The researcher’s job is ultimately to create knowledge of value and to change people’s thinking. To do this, scholars know the importance of being a professional with integrity and publishing in respected journals. For the researcher, reputation and research discoverability have always been “top priorities” (Cojocaru & Cojucaru, 2020).
But today, top journals and conferences are not the only options for career success.
What is SMAP?
Social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook combined with Academic Social Media (ASM) platforms like ORCID, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate offer tremendous opportunities to boost reputation and research visibility and impact.
For the user, SMAP has 3 orientations: actor, network, and relationship (see Kong et al., 2019 and their diagram below). The actor- or researcher-oriented application of SMAP involves the research tasks involved with research, writing it up, and corresponding with journals. The network-oriented tasks involve communicating with actual or potential research collaborators and following research trends. Finally, the relationship-oriented tasks involve building relationships through recommendations, following and interacting with others by “liking” and sharing posts.
Benefits
While reputation and research visibility still depend largely on traditional journals and conferences of high impact, SM platforms and strategies can act as intensifiers. The benefits of leveraging SM for academics include the following:
- Gaining professional visibility and credibility
- Broadening network connections – it is easier to connect with researchers if you follow them on SM and interacting with them in comments
- Understanding a researcher’s personality on SM
- Following professionally relevant news anytime, anywhere
- Obtaining even information and follow live tweets or live streams if unable to physically participate in the event
- Accessing information about project calls, projects, news trends and ideas.
So, why haven’t academics been more aggressive in making social media for academic purposes (SMAP) and social media tools “top priorities”?
Obstacles to adopting SMAP
There are several reasons scholars have been resistant in taking up SMAP, but there are 5 main concerns:
- The amount of time needed to follow people and trends and engage with them on top of an already busy research teaching and administrative schedule
- Lack of knowledge and skills necessary to participate in academic social media
- The blurring of personal and professional life
- Confidentiality issues
- Academic rigor and professional image.
However, the main obstacles are 1 and 2. The time-consuming nature of social media engagement is undeniable. But if the researcher has collaborators, research assistants or is a PI, then the question becomes more about allocating roles and creating SM publishing and engagement protocols and schedules.
However, this means overcoming concern number 2 — the lack of knowledge of SM knowledge and skills — which is not so easy.
Where’s the training?
This is a problem — even for millennial researchers. Even though they have grown up with social media and have more SM intuition than Gen Xers and Boomers, they still need training to create appropriate online academic personas, netiquette, and communication tone, not to mention the skills involved in writing concise, smart and interesting SM posts, infographics, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and webinars.
The question is, who will be responsible for this training? Should it be librarians? Consultants? Or, perhaps new faculty in charge of not only research ethics but also identity management for researchers, their research, and research institutions?
In the next few weeks, this Blog will share SM strategies and techniques that have been successfully used by researchers and offer suggestions for forward-thinking departments to create or enhance training programs to leverage SMAP to boost researcher, research and research institution visibility and impact.
References
Cojocaru, I., & Cojocaru, I. (2020). Social media use to enable better research visibility. In Central and Eastern European eDem and eGov Days (pp. 443-452).
Kong, X., Shi, Y., Yu, S., Liu, J., & Xia, F. (2019). Academic social networks: Modeling, analysis, mining and applications. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 132, 86-103.
