Thing 6 - Managing Your Online Research Networks

As an alternative to blogging and tweeting about research, online social or professional research network sites are excellent for collaboration.

LinkedIn is the profile platform that suits my personal needs. I agree with some of the other bloggers/commenters that it would be considered as an online CV platform, but I find that its a great platform to keep up-to-date with trends in your community, participating in interest group forums where researchers can use the space to spruke views, discussions and ideas on their papers/ research. There could be instances where the researchers could add their publications on their LinkedIn profile. I am aware of instances where researchers link directly to their publications, or even directly to their chosen research collection platform to boost their discovery. For example:


Hence I believe LinkedIn is a great research networking and current awareness tool.





Academia.edu I have come across to acces open access papers, but also weary about the privacy and security features of the site as some others have mentioned. Recently, in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, (29th January 2016) this platform was criticised for its marketting ploy to charge authors for a fee for each time their articles were recommended. Check out http://bit.ly/1NN7cEO. 
It was stated that "In fact, the controversy has led some Twitter users to cite the hashtag #DeleteAcademiaEdu and post messages that they were deactivating their accounts."


 I think that researchers need to establish which of the profile platforms is best suited and accessed by other researchers in the field. The danger is that it could be a niche field of research, hence may have a niche platform to collaborate and promote their research.

I think that the motivation behind managing your presence on any particular research  network / platform is how you view the importance of research community engagement.

Thing 5 - Social Media for Researchers / Article "The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? - Melissa Terras"

 I chose to read "The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? - Melissa Terras" mainly because intuitively I felt the answer was YES of course it is!" and after reading this post it confirmed my thoughts. Altmetrics is a buzzword when it comes to blogging / tweeting or using any social media platform to help the researcher understand the popularity of their work through the number of 'likes', 'shares', 'tweets/re-tweets', and such indicators of reading and sharing or using the information.

The author chose to study what the impact of  blogging about each of the articles written and tweeted followers with links to the original article. Traditional academic researchers may on the contrary find this a time-consuming excersise, in addition with the lack of technological know-how support. This is perhaps an opportunity for Research advisors/Librarians / Liaision Librarians / who may be  on-board and offer such training to kick-start the traditional academics on this journey. It may be an idea for having 'researcher-hubs' in institutions for cross-disciplinary researchers to get together and share how they have been dealing with traditional versus alternative engaging methods of disseminating their research.

A couple of points of interest in this article to consider were:

• Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were, on average, 70 downloads of my papers. 
• As an example of  the author's blog posts, there were  2000 visits per month, 70% new with an average time on the site of 1 minute and 5 seconds
• It's all about the timing - Don’t tweet things at midnight; don’t tweet important things on a Friday, especially not late; The best time is between 11am and 5pm GMT, Monday to Thursday in a working week.

Thing 3 & 4 - Collaboration Tools and File Sharing

I believe the collaboration aspect is very significant in the journey of a researcher. It is always great to gain feedback and perspectives on parts of the research you have been working on. There are located and cloud aspects of collaboration.

When working on any research project, the progress of the research project is best communicated to your research group via located presentations on the research and then asking for the audience input.

  For cloud research sharing, I believe some great collaboration tools could help in getting your work out there and open for comment:

> twitter
> Google Docs
> Prezi
> Slideshare

You may  also want to share referencing resources for which EndNote Web is another great collaboration tool!

File Sharing - I mainly use Google Docs for file sharing purposes. The greatest benefit I find in this tool is that users can edit files in real time simultaneously!
In terms of security, only the users that you share the docs with have access to the material. 

Thing 2 - Notetaking Tools

When it comes to taking notes, I am an Ipad user. Hence, most of the time use the "Notes" app that comes in the pre-set ipad menu. However, in the context for Researchers, some of the good note-taking apps would be :

• Evernote 
• Note Lock - $1.29 from the App store - this is useful especially if researchers want to make their notes / data private. It is a a password - protected app that allows users to make notes, add photos / pictures and has double lock mechanisms - a passcode system and a secret pattern. For a small fee, this is great value!
• Notetaker - You are attending a seminar on your favourite topic. You may set this app to record the session and simultaneously type your notes. Whenever you want to re-visit a particular section of your notes, the recording will commence at the point of where your notes are!

23 Research Things - Thing 1 - Blogging

Blogging is not something that comes to me naturally. Ask me to share a link on twitter or facebook and comment on it and I am ready to do that in a heart-beat. I believe that researchers have a lot to offer when it comes to blogging. It was a bit of a challenge for a non-tech-savvy person like me to firstly find a blogging platform that suited my needs! And now here it is...

When encouraging a researcher to start blogging, the first thing I would encourage them to do is to 'follow' existing bloggers. The main reason for this is for them to see it as a means of informal networking opportunities. The other benefit of blogging for researchers is to have an idea and information exchange opportunity from people with similar research interests around the world! Once researchers set up a regular pattern to read blogs of their particular interests, it may encourage them to either contribute or set up a blog for themselves where they can explore personal and professional growth.

Some of the blogs that I follow have often shown interesting articles about the experiences of a PhD student, experiences and lessons learnt from research processes, informative blogs on publishing, copyright and open access. These blogs enable me to broaden my knowledge in the process of researching and publishing.

A couple of the the blogs that I follow are:

• the thesis whisperer
• scholarly kitchen