Peer support, finding a place within academia, staying up to date with the latest research, communicating research to wider audiences and navigating life after PhD. Ema Talam and Jon Fairburn outline five ways in which social media, and in particular Twitter, can make all the difference to PhD research at a time when regular academic … Continued
Category: Academic Social Media
In 2021 let’s do institutional academic social media better.
Chances are you dutifully follow a number of poorly managed institutional academic social media accounts, producing infrequent, unengaging and perhaps occasionally important content. In this post, Andy Tattersall, provides advice on how to approach institutional academic social media in a more productive way and makes the case for its vital role in keeping academia connected … Continued
Equipping PhD researchers for social media success
Social media is increasingly recognised as an important feature of academic life and institutions are investing in training sessions to help doctoral students towards this. However, what this training consists of, and how sessions are best run is less clear. In this post, Mark Carrigan and Ana Isabel Canhoto share their experience of designing and … Continued
How an audience-first approach to social media increases engagement with your research
Developing an online presence can be an effective way to communicate research. However, simply sharing your output on social media is not enough. Who this reaches is important for impact and scholarly debate. Kirsty Wallis calls for an audience-first approach to social media, arguing that taking the time to understand your audience and your social … Continued
Behavioural Economics on a Post-It
The COVID-19 lockdown has rapidly and radically changed academic life, disrupting the normal patterns of teaching and research that define the university. In this post, Adam Oliver reflects on how the lockdown led to him develop the behavioural economics on a post-it series and the particular challenges presented in reducing complex academic ideas to the … Continued
From hermits to celebrities – How social media is reshaping academic hierarchies and what we can do about it.
By adopting social media in increasing numbers, academics have also bought into the dynamics of social media celebrity. In this post Mark Carrigan reflects on the impact of the attention economy on academia and how attention is often unfairly concentrated on a small number of individuals. Taking this into account, he argues that well edited multi-author outlets can play an […]
Emojis in Scholarly Communication: 🔥 or 💩?
Do you speak emoji? Emojis, have become an ubiquitous feature of online communication. However, their use by academics is, as yet, limited. In this cross-post Alice Fleerackers discusses Stefanie Haustein’s research at the ScholCommLab, which uses Altmetric data to explore how academics speak the language of emoji. “Should there be an emoji for everything?” asked journalist Sophie Haigney in a recent New Yorker article. […]
Running a ‘nearly carbon neutral conference’ – Lessons from the Feral Conference
Previous posts on the Impact Blog have argued that academic conferences are bad for the environment and can present a barrier to increased diversity and inclusion within the research community. Digital communication media are often recommended as a potential solution to these issues. In this post, Nicholas Holm, Sy Taffel, Trisia Farrelly and Lisa Vonk describe how they organised the […]
Don’t be a giraffe – How to avoid trolls on academic social media
Social media has acquired a reputation for being a highly polarised and argumentative public sphere. Whereas, the vast majority of academic social media is generally good natured, it can also be plagued by bad actors. In this post, Andy Tattersall shares a number of simple measures and tips on how to deal with the dark side of social media. When […]