Promoting the domain/field of your research work
While conventional methods for sharing data, information and knowledge, such as conferences, seminars, journal articles and reports, and now institutional repositories, are an important part of the communication of research and development, the way people source information has been changing. Social media has been growing in importance and steadily breaking down barriers to communication, allowing people to connect, engage and share in a more informal way.
Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use (Wikipedia). In addition, Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. Social media as tools for researchers:
● Tools to help you achieve your communication goals
– Dissemination / promoting your work
– Developing networks / building collaborations
– Finding information
● Works alongside face to face communication and traditional communication (e.g. websites, journal articles)
● May help you reach different audiences, including those outside academia
● Can be an efficient way to reach a large audience
Every discipline has its own network and/or professional bodies. So, it is obvious that you should target your professional network to share your work. Nevertheless, you should also share your work through generic research sharing social networks and other social networking websites. Social media and academic social networks, which helps in increasing global visibility, accessibility and readability of publications shared by the contributing authors. The researchers in the twenty first century are very keen to maintain online researchers’ profiles in academic social networking websites. They are also interested in transnational networking through online discussion forums, and peer-to-peer collaborative platforms. While a plenty of general purpose social networking sites are globally available, some online social networks are meant for academics and researchers. Academic social networking websites facilitate creation of online groups for discussion based on particular research interests.
Here some personalized public profile of researchers in academic social networking sites and their Functionalities.
| Website | Functionalities |
| Acadmica | Academic social networking; Public profile listing research publications, research projects, research positions and training; Self-archiving published unpublished and forthcoming publications. |
| CiteULike | Online reference manager; Public sharing of publications within a researchers’ group. |
| Getcited | Academic social networking; Self-archiving published unpublished and forthcoming publications. |
| Google Scholar Citations | Citations tracking; Online reference manager. |
| ImpactStory | Citations tracking; Public profile listing research publications and research presentations Article level metrics of your publications. |
| Professional social networking; Public profile listing research publications, research projects, research positions and training. | |
| Mendeley | Online reference manager; Public sharing of publications within a researchers’ group. |
| ORCID | Authors’ registry with unique identifiers; Public profile listing research publications. |
| ResearcherID | Authors’ registry with unique identifiers; Public profile listing research publications. |
| ResearchGate | Academic social networking; Public profile listing research publications, research projects, research positions and training; Self-archiving published un-published and forthcoming publications. |
| Research blogging | Site providing blog space for research work; All discipline covered |
| SkillsPages | Professional social networking; Finding skilled people. |
| SlideShare | Public sharing of presentation slides, visual documents and publications. |
| Zotero | Online reference manager; Public sharing of publications within a researchers’ group. |
| SSRN | Self-archiving published unpublished and forthcoming publications; Public profile listing research publications within a special group of social science researchers. |
Apart from considering joining any of the above platforms, for sharing your work and building your research profile, we suggest you to consider the following:
YouTube
Research today is not all about text alone. It is also about sharing your work and allowing others know how you did your work. Once your work is accepted and published, consider sharing a short video of your work. Ideally, you should plan about using video to promote your work, and for this you can use any simple digital camera to record some of your work in process/progress. Catching your work in action gives a sense of the difficulty/challenges in carrying out the work or demonstrates the methodology to the audience. YouTube has become a great place to share your work with others.
You may like to use the world’s most used social networking site for sharing your video and information about your published work. While this helps to reach more people, if your work is already in open access, sharing the link there will help them to read your work.
This is a micro-blogging site that allows you to update your status in 140 characters. It is one of the most popular ways to remain networked and share opinions about some aspect of our life, including scientific and scholarly achievements. You can share information about publication of your work, and also in a series of status post, you can share the finding. If you want to have discussion and all comments from other users to be gathered at one place, you may like to create a Hashtag (#).
Blogging
There are many blogging sites that enable you to create your free blogs. You may also like to create a paid blog site for your research or your research team to share your work. Blogging is used in many ways by scholars and scientists. Research Blogging is space where users not only share abstracts their work, but also share news appeared in other sites. You can use blogging as an option to continuously write about your work, and thereby connect with the people who are working in the similar areas.
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