Surprisingly, LEGO is one of the items often found piling up on the seabed. It can get caught up in fishing nets or washed up on the shore after storms, which is how a team of researchers in the UK ended up studying it.

Read the study: “Weathering and persistence of plastic in the marine environment: Lessons from LEGO”

In a paper in Environmental Pollution, Dr. Andrew Turner and colleagues at the University of Plymouth describe their analysis of LEGO bricks from the ocean. Dr. Turner said:

“The study was rather unusual, because we hadn’t planned it. A colleague of mine, who is also a beach cleaner, introduced me to some of the LEGO that he’d found. I thought we could try to match the blocks with the ones we were already studying and date them.”

Dr. Turner had already been studying LEGO as a toy – specifically showing that some of the pigments used in the past had been quite harmful. As a result, he had access to data about LEGO from people’s collections, which he could use as a comparison for the bricks that had been in the sea.

These items are ideal for studying the persistence of plastic in marine environments for a few reasons: LEGO bricks are relatively easy to date, because of the different pigments used over time and the batch markings. They are also unique in their long-term use as toys.

“Lego is an iconic kind of plastic,” Dr. Turner said. “It’s identifiable, and it has stood the test of time. I can’t think of any other plastic products that are still in use and popular 70 years later.”

Estimating the lifespan of LEGO in the ocean

One question you may be asking is how does all this LEGO end up at the bottom of the ocean? Believe it or not, the leading theory is that it is flushed down the toilet by mischievous children. Dr. Turner was skeptical at first, but research published by an insurance company showed that one of the major routes by which toys are lost is flushing – and it is estimated that millions of toys are lost this way every year.

“I can’t recall doing that myself,” Dr. Turner said, “but you can’t imagine children with LEGO sets leaving much on the beach. We’re talking about a range of blocks from over the years – it seems that flushing is the main route by which they enter the oceans, as bizarre as that sounds.”

The first challenge in studying ocean-dwelling LEGO is getting hold of it: collecting items nestled on the seabed is harder than picking up those at the surface. The LEGO bricks the team collected had been caught in fishing nets or washed up during storms. They showed clear signs of having been in the ocean: they were cracked or broken, and many had things growing on them.

But compared with floating plastic items, they showed less degradation. This is because plastic degrades by exposure to sunlight as well as mechanical abrasion. The plastic that lasts longer tends to be the denser plastic that sinks to the seabed and away from sunlight.

With LEGO bricks from the ocean, Dr. Turner and the team could start tackling the second challenge: working out when they had been manufactured and how long they had been in the ocean.

This is where the unique properties of LEGO came in useful. Bricks have batch numbers, and the pigments used have changed over time. They could compare the bricks visually with those in people’s collections to see if they looked the same, then check the batch numbers and finally analyze the pigments with a spectrometer to get a good estimate of the manufacturing date.

Since Dr. Turner had already been studying pigments, he had plenty of data for comparison. For example, when they found the red pigment cadmium sulphoselenide, they knew the brick was manufactured between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, when that pigment was being used.

With an estimate of the age of the bricks, the team could determine how long the bricks could survive at sea. Knowing how much each item would have weighed new, they could measure how much mass it had lost while in the ocean, and then estimate how long it might last in that environment.

Building public interest

The survival time the team estimated in their paper was 100–1300 years. The uncertainty in the estimate is a result of the different conditions the LEGO bricks are subjected to in the ocean, as Dr. Turner explained:

“Some LEGO may have been exposed to more sandblasting or burial; others may have been exposed to occasional beaching, or they may have been deposited in slightly shallower water where they were exposed to sunlight. And some pigments will perhaps make LEGO longer lasting than others.”

The estimate attracted the attention of the world’s news media, generating headlines announcing that LEGO will survive more than 1,000 years and resulting in an Altmetric attention score of more than 500. According to Dr. Turner, the interest is related to LEGO’s iconic status and familiarity.

“It’s something everyone can relate to,” he said. “It’s got a relationship with childhood as well – most people played with LEGO sets as children.”

Discover the coverage: https://www.altmetric.com/details/77307410

The attention was kicked off by a press release that the University of Plymouth’s news team issued, as well as coauthors sharing the article on social media. It wasn’t just the news media that responded: members of the public and other researchers have written to the team with questions and requests, including for samples of the bricks to analyze or show in meetings and talks. And an educational authority in the Netherlands contacted Dr. Turner to ask if they could use the study in an exam question.

“The study has had some wide interest in other areas as well as the media. It’s gathered quite a lot of interest, which has meant our work has had some good publicity.”

One critical aspect of the work plays into its popularity, and that’s the involvement of expert members of the public. “Perhaps some of the most innovative research comes from not planning things but from having these sparks of ideas from people. In this case, we had a background knowledge of LEGO and everything fell into place. It’s not often you have ideas that come to fruition like that.”

Dr. Turner’s top tip for promoting research

“We’ve had several research projects over the past three or four years, and the ones that have been picked up by the public the most are the ones that have involved citizen science. I think scientists quite often live in their own bubble and communicate with each other, but there’s a lot to learn from members of the public with expertise. If you are somebody who is passionate about plastic litter, if you have some interesting ideas or interesting observations, get in touch with scientists. Maybe that could lead to a small project that could widen the awareness of it and put it in a scientific context.”

Listen to the accompanying podcast episode here.

The post How long does LEGO last in the ocean? appeared first on Altmetric.

This is a topic that Dr. David Carrier, comparative biomechanist and Professor of Biology at the University of Utah in the US, wanted to unpack – and he predicted a link with fighting. In a paper in Integrative Organismal Biology, Dr. Carrier and his team describe a study they conducted suggesting that beards may have evolved in humans to protect vulnerable bones during physical competition for mates.

Read the study: “Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair”

To understand this research, we need to wind the clock back a couple of centuries. When Charles Darwin noticed that animals’ characteristics sometimes made sense for competing for mates but not necessarily for long-term survival, he developed the theory of sexual selection.

Connected to this is the observation that males and females of a species often have different characteristics, in terms of anatomy, physiology and behavior. This is referred to as sexual dimorphism. Dr. Carrier explained:

“Throughout the animal kingdom, females invest most in their offspring; that female investment is particularly pronounced in mammals, where you have females incubating the young in their bodies for a period of time followed by a period of lactation after they’re born. As a result, females tend to be picky about which males they mate with, and that puts males in the position of having to compete. In mammals, the primary competition in most species comes down to physical competition – the threat of a fight or an actual fight.”

This is where Dr. Carrier’s interest in beards comes in. Facial hair one example of sexual dimorphism in humans – generally, it’s the males that grow beards. This would suggest that beards play a role in sexual selection, that they give the males an advantage in competition with one another for mates.

Could beards protect humans in a fight?

Scientists have studied the role of facial hair in competition for mates; in fact, it’s something that Darwin looked at. Other species show sexual dimorphism in this area, like lions, elk and lynx, which have thicker hair around the neck region. In these cases, Darwin believed this was to protect the vulnerable neck area. But when it came to humans, his conclusion fell on the attraction side of the fence: that women are more attracted to men with beards.

Darwin’s conclusion may have been more readily supported by social observations in the 19th century, but today, it’s less apparent that females prefer full beards. Instead, Dr. Carrier and his team wondered whether beards provide some sort of protection to the face, connecting the sexual dimorphism in facial hair to physical competition for mates, like we see in other mammals.

The theory makes sense when you think about how humans fight, Dr. Carrier said. “If the desire is to actually kill another individual, we tend to show up with weapons. If the desire is just to control or manipulate another individual, then you’re going to get hand-to-hand fighting; in that physical combat situation, humans tend to use their fist, and the primary target when we strike is the face.”

A punch in the face is most likely to damage the jaw – epidemiological studies of emergency rooms show that the lower jaw is the most likely bone to break as a result of a punch. “We’re thinking that it may not be a coincidence that it is primarily the jaw that is covered by the beard,” Dr. Carrier said.

Dr. Carrier and his team wanted to test whether facial hair protects the facial bones. While they had used human cadavers in previous studies, it didn’t seem practical for this study, so they needed to develop a model that would behave in the same way as a human face. The model they came up with was a fiber epoxy composite for the jawbone, which has the same physical strength and toughness of bone, and sheep skin to mimic the skin and hair of the face.

An undergraduate student on the team built the models with skin that was shaven or unshaven on top of the fiber composite. Using something called a drop weight impact tester, they dropped weights on the model and measured the force of the impact.

“The results really surprised me,” Dr. Carrier said. “The forces were 16 percent greater when the fur wasn’t there, and about 40 percent more energy was absorbed when the fur was there.”

We like to read about ourselves

The surprising results go some way to explaining why the study attracted attention on social media and mainstream media, resulting in an Altmetric attention score of 595. The journal issued a press release, which led to the media coverage. Dr. Carrier believes it became popular for two reasons: it’s about humans, and it’s controversial.

“Any time you’re working on an unusual aspect of humans, people are going to have some interest in that for that reason, because it is about them,” he said.

Discover the coverage: https://oxfordjournals.altmetric.com/details/79862600/news

“We have not intended to draw attention, but I think it’s now at the point where we can predict. For example, we knew we knew this beard study was going to attract attention, even as we were starting it. We knew if we got anything interesting, there was going to be media attention.”

The beard study is the latest of many of the team’s studies that have caught the public’s attention. One reason for this is that in every case, the anatomy they study is also used for other things: for example, the proportions of the human hand enable us to form a fist to use as a club, but they’re also associated with manual dexterity. In this study, they are suggesting the beard provides an advantage by protecting the face, but another explanation is that it could be attractive to potential mates, which is what Darwin suggested.

“Some people find it incredulous that we would suggest that beards are somehow associated with fighting,” Dr. Carrier said. “From our perspective, it just follows that this incredibly sexually dimorphic character is associated with physical aggression. But there is some resistance to this idea that we may be anatomically specialized for fighting. It’s scary, because if it is true, it suggests that fighting has been important in our evolutionary past, that in some way we have become adapted to physical aggression. And if we’re anatomically specialized for aggression, well, maybe we’re behaviorally specialized for or in some cases inclined towards it.”

Prof. Carrier’s top tip for promoting research

“I’m not sure I have any specific advice other than an observation. Over the years, our work that has gotten the most attention has been the work that’s related to humans. The other thing that has tended to draw attention to this work is the controversial nature of it: the fact that it’s problematic for some people that we would be suggesting that part of the reason there may be facial hair in human males is that it provides protection in a fight. I think that controversy draws attention as well.”

Listen to the accompanying podcast episode here.

The post Beards evolved to protect humans from a punch in the face appeared first on Altmetric.

One of the initial hopes of altmetrics, particularly those based on tweets, was that they might help to democratize the data we use to understand research impact and make measures fairer by reducing geographical and language biases. Unlike citation data from the US-centric Web of Science, which by definition does not cover journals without English abstracts and thus underrepresents publications from the Global South, altmetrics were seen by many as being free of national and language biases. But, while Twitter users can tweet in any language and—with a few exceptions—from anywhere in the world, analyses of tweets linking to scientific papers have shown that the same or similar biases persist and are often even intensified on Twitter.

Identifying tweet locations is complicated

Today’s post will focus on where users tweeting scientific articles are located. To begin to unpack this, we need to understand how we can identify locations, based on available Twitter data. Twitter provides the possibility to geotag each tweet with precise latitude-longitude information of a user’s location at the time of tweeting (e.g., geocoded tweet location for Ottawa, Ontario marked in green in the Figure below). So theoretically geotagged tweets would allow for rich data to locate where research literature is discussed frequently. Combining author addresses from publication metadata with geotags from Twitter would thus provide a unique angle to analyze where research is produced and where it is used. Adding a temporal layer, we could even explore how scientific information and associated hashtags spreads geographically. However, as we will see in today’s post, determining a tweeter’s geolocation is not as straightforward in praxis as it might seem in theory.

Geotagging tweets is not a default setting

Although tweets can be tagged with exact latitude-longitude information, geotagging is not activated by default, so that less than 5% of tweets actually contain geo coordinates. Instead, when Twitter gives data to companies like Altmetric, they try to enrich geo locations of tweets based on information in users’ Twitter bios (e.g., Twitter bio location marked in red). Since that information is not generated automatically but freely edited by users, it requires some processing to determine the user’s location. A study in 2012 showed that while only 8% of profiles contained specific latitude-longitude information, a bit more than half of Twitter profiles linked to an exact location, one fifth to a country, and 15% to fictional places such as “Hogwarts”. So, while we there is a lot of Twitter location data out there, it does not necessarily provide accurate information about where tweets linking to scientific publications where sent from.

Twitter bios help to enrich location information

Based on the Twitter data provided by Gnip, Altmetric is able to show location information for 58% of its tweets. Due to the lack of granular geotags, Altmetric’s products—the Altmetric Explorer and details pages—limit geolocation to the country level. The Altmetric dump file distributed for research purposes contains the latitude-longitude data based on geotags and Gnip’s enriched geolocations. Since this blog post is based on the handbook chapter, which analyzed the Altmetric data dump from June 2016, we can have a look at this more granular data to determine tweet locations. Aggregating the number of tweets and users per geolocation, it becomes apparent that Twitter’s enriched location information is not accurate enough to determine exact locations. Whenever the Twitter bio information is not detailed enough to identify a city, geographical midpoints on the country level serve as a proxy: For example, among the top 10 geolocations based on number of unique users in the Altmetric data dump, Penrith—close to the geographical center of the UK—is the third most prevalent location. Ranked 8th and 9th, Esbon and Center in Kansas are close to the midpoint of the US. While it is quite plausible that the majority of tweets linking to scientific papers are sent from users in London, New York, DC and Toronto, it is less credible that remote locations in the US and UK play a major role.

When using the geotags provided in the Altmetric dump file, cleaning latitude-longitude information is thus a prerequisite for analyzing the location of Twitter users below the country level. The number of users per resident might be a metric to identify such unprobable locations stemming from geographical midpoints as country proxies: the plausible locations have a user-resident ratio of less than 15 Twitter users per 1,000 residents, while the ratios for the less probably locations is almost 1:1 or higher.

One third of tweets linking to papers are from the US, UK and Canada

Without cleaning of latitude and longitude data, the analysis of where users tweet scholarly documents from needs to be restricted to the country level. Users from the US are the most active tweeters, with 20% (4.8 million) of tweets are sent by just over half a million distinct Twitter users. They are followed by the UK (11% of tweets), Canada, Australia and Spain (3% each). With one exception, the top 10 countries—in terms of number of tweets—are all large countries in Europe or North America (see map). In the 2016 research dataset we worked with, the exception is a small Caribbean island named Saint Vincent: it ranks seventh behind Japan in terms of number of tweets and places third behind the US and UK ranked by number of tweeted documents. That’s more than three tweets per resident! The Saint Vincent tweets actually point to a misclassification of users with ‘worldwide’ locations by Twitter’s geo-enriching algorithm. The bug that was fixed in August 2016 and Altmetric reclassified the ‘worldwide’ locations as ‘unknown’ countries. This example illustrates that user-provided information from the Twitter bio is often not exact and attempts by data providers such as Gnip and Altmetric to enrich this data does not always yield accurate results. In terms of number of users instead of tweets, Saint Vincent places 45th behind Singapore.

Countries in the top 10 (see table) change only slightly with India, Japan and France improving and Australia and Spain losing a rank. The user-resident ratio and the relative to the world average indicate that China, India and Germany (relative ratio <1) are underrepresented among countries tweeting about scholarly papers, while the UK, Australia, Canada, the US and the Netherlands are particularly overrepresented (relative ratio >4.5). The data shows that Twitter geolocations should only be used as a proxy and not an exact indication of where scientific papers are tweeted. Based on the Altmetric data dump, location information is available for less than two-third of tweets, which can be used to identify country-level data. Data cleaning is absolutely essential before analyzing latitude- longitude information.

English tweets prevail

Given the location of the Twitter users who shared publications, it is perhaps unsurprising, that the majority of tweets are in English. Even when the research topic is one that is most relevant in non-English speaking places, English-language tweets prevail. For example, when the Zika outbreak was considered an international emergency by WHO in February 2016, research naturally circulated on social media, but even though the people most affected spoke Portuguese, 90% of the Tweets that linked to the scientific publications were in English. Facebook was marginally less monolingual, with 76% of posts in English. This result reveals not only the language preferences of people sharing research on social media—and consequently any derived metrics—but also the importance of considering which online platforms are most relevant in different scenarios and contexts. For example, in the case of research about a disease that foremost affected Brazilians, it seems that posting articles on Facebook had a higher probability of reaching local, non-anglophone communities.

Geographic biases in Twitter metrics

So what does this mean for tweets as scholarly metrics? When using Twitter data to understand online activity related to scientific journal articles, one needs to consider that one third of tweets come from users in the US, UK and Canada and that the great majority of discussions are in English. Therefore scholarly Twitter metrics do by no means democratize research impact: instead of reducing known tendencies towards English speaking countries in the Global North, indicators based on tweets seem to intensify existing biases favoring authors from the US and UK. Since authors, institutions, publishers and funders are more likely to diffuse their own publications on Twitter, research from other regions might thus be overlooked. Papers authored by scholars from countries blocking Twitter (i.e., China, Iran and North Korea) and other platforms might thus be deprived of social media attention. Were tweet-based metrics used to evaluate any form of impact, researchers from these countries would be at a disadvantage, possibly missing out on funding and promotion. On the contrary, if microblogging activity was based on Weibo instead of Twitter, Chinese scholars and publications are likely overrepresented, underrepresenting research and impact from other parts of the world.

It is also important to keep in mind that any user-provided location information used to enrich geotags is a mere proxy of actual location, as algorithms turning freetext into location data are not not free of errors or the place provided in the Twitter bio might not be granular enough to identify an exact location. The geographic and language trends described above will naturally be reflected in what, who, how and when research gets shared on Twitter, which we will explore in the remaining posts on the Altmetric blog. As such, when interpreting altmetrics research, the location of users and associated biases need to be taken into consideration, especially when using altmetrics for research evaluation.

[1] Based on the Altmetric data dump from June 2016.

[2] The enriched geolocation of the Saint Vincent accounts point to a spot in the South Atlantic close to Antarctica (13,08333, -61.2).

Stefanie Haustein is assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies, whereshe teach research methods and evaluation, social network analysis and knowledge organization. Her research focuses on scholarly communication, bibliometrics, altmetrics and open science. Stefanie co-directs, together with Juan Pablo Alperin, the #ScholCommLab, a research group that analyzes all aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age. Stefanie tweets as @stefhaustein.

Dr. Germana Barata is a visiting scholar in the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University and a science communication researcher at the Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor) and the Centre for the Development of Creativity (Nudecri) at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. Barata’s research focuses on how social media and altmetrics (alternative metrics for measuring the societal impact of science) affect the value of Brazilian Science journals. She writes at Ciência em Revista and Diário de Vancouver, a monthly Vancouver diary for Jornal da Unicamp. A complete list of her publications and presentations can be found at ResearchGate.net, and she can be found on Twitter at @germanabarata.

Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin is a co-director of the #scholcommlab, as well as an Assistant Professor at the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing and an Associate Director of Research of the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University, Canada. A full list of publications and presentations can be found at ScholCommLab, and he can be found on Twitter at @juancommander.

The post It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re tweeting (Or: Where tweets about scholarly articles come from) appeared first on Altmetric.

It’s almost been a decade since altmetrics and social media-based metrics were introduced. Since those early days they have been heralded as indicators of the societal impact of research—after all we all like, comment and share things on social media. An early study had seen tweets to predict citation impact shortly after an article was published, which got hopes up that Twitter activity could serve as an early indicator of research impact. However, the analysis was soon followed by several large-scale correlation studies, which showed that there is hardly any connection between tweet and citation counts. But other than proving that Twitter activity did not measure the same type of impact as those reflected by citations, low correlations did not help to understand what tweets linking to scholarly publications did actually measure.

This mini series on scholarly Twitter metrics, to be published on the Altmetric blog over the next five weeks,  will explore the What, Where, How, When and Who of academic Twitter, to shed some light on the significance of tweets in the context of social media metrics. The blog posts are based on a book chapter [1] for the Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Indicators edited by Wolfgang Glänzel, Henk Moed, Ulrich Schmoch and Mike Thelwall, which will be published later this year. A preprint of the chapter is available on arXiv.

Before getting down into the nitty-gritty of scholarly Twitter metrics, let’s have a look at how Twitter is being used in academia. The digital age, the open access and open science movements, and social media have all shaken up the scholarly metrics landscape; Twitter has been at the epicenter of this research evaluation earthquake. After Mendeley, Twitter has been the largest source of altmetric events, and together with Facebook it represents the platform with the greatest potential to reflect the public’s interest in research. Twitter currently has more than 330 million active users worldwide and reaches between one quarter and one third of the online population in the US and UK.

Although widely used by the public, Twitter uptake among academics is quite low. Depending on samples and time of data collection, most studies estimate academic Twitter use to be around 10% to 15% of scholars. Even though many researchers are aware of Twitter, most do not tweet in a professional context. As a result, Twitter is often perceived as a shallow medium that is used to communicate “pointless babble”, which in turn leads to a greater reluctance against its use in academia. While as few as 6% of tweets by University faculty, postdocs and doctoral students link to scholarly articles, more than one fifth of recent journal articles are mentioned on Twitter, which suggests that at least a certain number of tweets to scholarly papers are sent by non-academic users. It is probably because of the combination of both high uptake by the general public and high altmetric activity, that Twitter has become the most popular data source of altmetrics research; the majority of studies either focuses on or includes tweets to scholarly publications.

Similarly to how the Science Citation Index influenced bibliometric research and research evaluation, the altmetrics landscape is being heavily shaped by data availability. The availability of tweet content and metadata via the Twitter APIs and through their data analytics service Gnip, which allow Altmetric and other altmetrics providers to purchase access, has also played an important role as to why Twitter has been a popular source of altmetrics. Because they started to systematically collect tweets linking to scholarly publications in 2012, Altmetric has become a particularly valuable data source for tracking Twitter activity related to journal articles and large scale and longitudinal Twitter research.

Analyzing 24 million tweets from the Altmetric data dump [2], the blog posts in the coming weeks will explore the What, How, Where, When and Who of Twitter activity related to scientific publications to provide some insight into the meaning of scholarly Twitter metrics. Going beyond the informative value of correlation coefficients, we will analyze the characteristics of frequently tweeted publications, dive into tweet content to explore the use of Twitter-specific affordances such as hashtags and retweets and analyze time patterns. The mini series concludes with a post on who is tweeting, to broach the issue of identifying users and their motivation to discuss scholarly publications online.

Any biases and particularities of tweets linking to scholarly documents will naturally be reflected in what, when, where and how research gets shared on Twitter and who shares it. These characteristics of tweeting behavior need to be taken into consideration when interpreting Twitter metrics, and especially when using altmetrics in the context of research evaluation.

On Thursday, I’ll begin my weekly series of posts about scholarly Twitter metrics by examining what kinds of documents get tweeted the most, be sure to check back in then! In the meantime, you might want to read more about Twitter’s role in scholarly communication in the chapter.

[1] The blog posts focus on the two datasets used in the chapter: all 24 million tweets captured by Altmetric and a subset of 3.9 million tweets linking to papers published 2012 and covered by the Web of Science. For detailed descriptions of methods and related literature refer to the chapter.

[2] The chapter is based on the Altmetric data dump from June 2016.

The post Twitter in scholarly communication appeared first on Altmetric.

Blogging 

Ethan and Jacquelyn both said they use blogs and Twitter most often to promote their research. Blogs are a really great way to introduce new research and participate in the conversations that are happening in your field. However, the blogosphere is not simply an online space from which to alert the world to your own activities.

Following other blogs, commenting on other people’s posts and including links to other blogs in your posts means you can participate in wider academic discussions, and potentially invite more engagement with your own research. If you create a blog using WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr, you can view and save preferred blogs from the same platform using the built-in “suggested blogs” sections on their sites.

You can also install the free Altmetric bookmarklet to see if anyone has mentioned your own research (or even other research published in your field) in a blog post – simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar and click it while viewing your article on the publisher site to bring up the Altmetric data.

For more blogging tips, this post from Helen Eassom at Wiley has some great suggestions for effective practise.

Maintaining a consistent digital identity

It’s important to be consistent with how you present your identity across different online platforms. For example, you might want to use the same photo across your university faculty page, blog homepage and social media accounts, so that people who might be interested in your research can instantly identify you and verify (for example) your Twitter account against your LinkedIn profile.

Another way of maintaining these connections is to link between platforms when posting. You can do this by sharing your newest blog posts on social media, or including a link to your blog or website in your Twitter bio and faculty page. According to Jacquelyn Gill, “Maintaining visibility on multiple platforms is key! I’ve found Twitter to be an especially great resource in signal-boosting blog posts and new articles. Most other platforms don’t take much work, but it’s always worth putting in the time to keep them up-to-date”.

Networking

Blogs and social media networks can offer the opportunity to engage with people you might not otherwise have had the chance to meet. If (for example) a fellow researcher leaves an interesting comment on one of your blog posts, it should be easy to respond to their comments, and perhaps later locate them on social media to continue the conversation. The people they follow might also be useful contacts to engage with, thereby increasing your own network. If you’re on the conference circuit, it’s always worth following up any talks you give with a link directly to your published research, using the conference hashtag to alert other delegates to your tweet.

As with blogging, the Altmetric bookmarklet can show you who has been sharing both your own work and other outputs published in your discipline via their blogs and on Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo and Google Plus – providing insight into who it might be worth following or reaching out to for additional visibility in future.

Ethan White had lots of interesting things to say about using online platforms to manage and update your professional network. He argued that it’s more useful to think of blogs and social media as tools to create mutually beneficial relationships that support knowledge dissemination.

“Developing a good network of online colleagues will ultimately help you promote your research online more successfully. Think about it this way: if you had a colleague who only ever stopped by your office to tell you that they’d just had a new paper published, you might not be super excited to see them, but if you have a colleague who you talk to about lots of different things, and respect based on their opinions on science in general, then you’d be excited to hear that they had a new idea or had just published a new paper”.

Ethan’s analogy works really well, and suggests that a researcher’s attitude towards online engagement with research is just as important as their practises.

Sharing your own research online 

Ensuring you research is as freely accessible as possible can really help raise your profile online. Make a habit of uploading articles to your institutional repository or sharing them amongst academic networks like Mendeley, Zotero or ResearchGate (once they are free of any embargo restrictions, of course), so they can be read by people who may not otherwise have access.

You can also use services such as Figshare to upload and attach unique identifiers to non-article research outputs, such as datasets, posters or images – giving other researchers the opportunity to reuse and build on your work (dependant on your chosen security and copyright preference settings). Once you’ve made your research available, you might like to include links to your outputs from your email signature, institutional faculty page or LinkedIn profile, or even post it to a subject specific forum.

If you’re keen to take it a step further you might like to consider building your own website to showcase your work. There are lots of free platforms available, so this need not be technically daunting – try Wix to help you get started.

Finally… how can I make sure my online activity is picked up by Altmetric?

• If you have a blog, email support@altmetric.com with the homepage and a link to the RSS feed, so we can add it to our list, and start picking up mentions of published research outputs in your posts.
• When blogging about research, make sure you embed a link to the article in the main body of text. Our software ignores headers and footers when scraping a page, so mentions of articles in footnotes don’t get picked up.
• When posting on social media, attach a link to the main article page of the research output on the publisher website, rather than to a PDF.

As always, feel free to give us feedback on this blog post – thanks for reading!

The post Tips and Tricks: How to promote your research successfully online appeared first on Altmetric.