Welcome to Day 4 of the Research Impact Challenge!
Earlier this week, you registered your ORCID, claimed your Google Scholar Profile, and explored a digital repository. Perhaps you’re beginning to notice the way that scholarly identities proliferate across many websites, applications, and profiles. It can easily become overwhelming!
Today’s Challenge:
Reflect on your use of social media, in order to consider how these tools pertain (or don’t!) to your
professional/scholarly identity, and make some thoughtful decisions about where to focus your time and effort in the coming year.
Let’s get started!
Here's how to do it:
1. First, use this worksheet to take an inventory of the social media platforms you use, especially noting those that have a connection of some kind to your scholarly identity. Go to File -> Make a copy, or File -> Download, to create a copy that you can edit.
2. After filling out the table, take 10 minutes or so to reflect on the questions at the bottom of the audit, and sketch out your priorities for this year.
Remember!
There are no right or wrong answers in this exercise! The audit is not a to-do list, and the goal of this activity is not to encourage you to create a presence on all of these sites. Rather, today’s goal is to take stock of where you already are, and to spend some time thinking carefully about where you want to focus your attention and efforts going forward.
Social media use may be more practical and useful in some disciplines than others. It can enable powerful connections with new colleagues and provide a platform to communicate about your work to the world. At the same time, there are risks, including harassment, abuse, and even job security. People of color, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, contingent faculty, people working on controversial scholarship, and other vulnerable groups may be more exposed to these risks.
The decision to engage on social media is always personal, as well as professional, and the stakes are not the same for everyone. Only you can decide the most meaningful and productive ways to engage with these tools for yourself and your work. Be sure to keep self-care—and care for your colleagues—in mind as you decide where to put your time and energy and how to share your work with the world.
What next?
Make some decisions for yourself about where you want to invest time and energy in your scholarly identity on social media this year.
Some advice from others who have been there:
Carrigan, M. (2017). Social media is scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Fisher, C. (2021). Tips for Building an Online Presence & Optimizing Social Media Use as a Grad Student.
Froelich, H. (2017). How I use Twitter as an academic.
Reardon, J. (2019). The Benefits of Social Media: 6 Twitter Tips for Graduate Students. Inside Higher Education.
Shaw, St. (2022). How Should Academics Engage Through Social Media? Psychology Today.
Ready to talk about your scholarship online? Take a look at these Tips and Tricks from Altmetric. This is also a sneak preview of alternative metrics, which we'll dig into tomorrow.
Remember: If you didn’t publish your work in an open access journal/repository/medium, when using social media you'll want to provide a link to a shareable version of your work whenever possible. This will allow people without access to the publication to read your work. Remember to check SHERPA/RoMEO to determine which version of an article you can freely share. If you've deposited your work in an open access repository (Day 3 Challenge), that's a great link to share!
Are you experiencing harassment or abuse on social media? Check out the Crash Override Network for resources and support.
How well do you understand the rights that you’ve granted to the sites, platforms, and apps that you use? Check out Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, a tool created by a user rights initiative that evaluates websites' "Terms of Service" and assigns them grades based on how organizations describe their use of data, privacy policy, and user activity tracking.
Learn more:
How to explain your research to people outside your discipline, and why it matters. Access these articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education through University of Maine system's subscription.
Read about the ways that women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, scholars doing controversial work, and other vulnerable populations may be disproportionately burdened by harassment and trolling online.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. (2015). Who do you think you are: When Marginality meets academic microcelebrity. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, Issue 7.
Flaherty, Colleen. (2017). Threats for what she didn’t say. Inside Higher Ed.
Jeong, S. (2015). The internet of garbage. New York, NY: Forbes Media. This book is freely available for download through the title link - scroll to the bottom of the book description for a PDF or ePub download option.
Preparing for your next challenge:
Congratulations! You’ve completed Day 4 of the Research Impact Challenge. Not only have you taken an inventory of your current social media engagement, you've made time to reflect on how you might use these tools to your best advantage in the coming year.
In the final challenge, we’ll address myriad ways to measure the impact of your work. See you on Day 5!