Social Media Networks in Research

 In this post I will talk about social media in research.

A network for connecting with other researchers and look at their work, favorite it and getting access to full texts is Researchgate. It can be useful to do research as well (i.e. looking at the recommended articles of researchers in your field).

Google Scholar is a good database to do intensive research for different types of publications with good filter possibilities. It also lets you favorite and group entries.

It is also possible to look at scientific blogs for interesting approaches. On some blogs, authors post a summary of their papers, or a different, more informal take on them. Blogs also give the opportunity to follow popular authors. Also a good scope of topics and how they are presented.

The Researcher 2.0

I think that Researcher 2.0 has the opportunity to connect on a different level. It is possible to interact with people all over the world, sharing knowledge or recognizing each other's work. There are also tools that help to organize and share information, or entire workspaces easily. I see this as a big plus when working in a team on projects.

A negative aspect of being connected and having access to any content at any time is the overflow of information. Researcher 2.0 has to limit herself to the input they are getting. The overflow of information can become burdensome very quickly. 

Symbaloo

A good tool to organize all applications and tools to use as Researcher 2.0 can be well organized with Symbaloo.

My workspace looks like this:

Reflection on the course

 In general, I liked the concept of having a well-prepared online format where one can work at tasks in a structured manner.

I learned about the importance of having a digital identity and the possibilities this gives a researcher. Also how easy it is to create a blog in blogger. This gave me the opportunity to continue working on my online identity without the constraints of a big social media network.

The ORCID is an important identification for authors that I knew about before, but also by attending a course from Burgos. 

The topic on filtering content and the provided tools for filtering this content was interesting. I am honest, I did not jet try them fully (looked at the tutorial) because of the number of accounts I had to create for this course. But I have to say the idea of filtering the contents that I see from blogs for example could be very helpful for saving time and the constant filtering we do ourselves.

Social software for the researcher 2.0 was helpful. It gave me confidence in using Google Drive as I currently do and maybe even use it more. Google Drive is one of my favorite tools to work collaboratively, so I was happy that it was included in the course.

The last topic visibility and dissemination of research through social networks gave me more tools on hand to work with social media. I am currently using research gate to get to full texts and follow my favorite authors, or people from my network. I learned about the possibility to discuss topics separately and also answer questions on my profile.

Hootsuite is a program I will continue to use, especially for Twitter usage during (hopefully soon in person) conferences. When attending conferences seeing what people post, but also my own tweets and following hashtags at the same time seems useful. As well as planning to tweet something if I am the presenter and have no time to announce my talk.

Overall, the course gave me interesting insights and new tools. There were also parts that I already knew, but this only strengthened my previous approach. Thank you for the course!