Devin Soper, our Scholarly Communications Librarian, can help you out!  He is an expert in using social media platforms to connect scientific communities and improve scholars’ online presence.  He provides one-on-one assistance as well as group presentations. 

See one of his previously recorded presentations here: http://bit.ly/2mA6upI or contact him at dsoper@fsu.edu.

I had the opportunity to attend two of Devin’s recent Social Media presentations!  Devin suggested seven important ways to develop or improve your scholarly identity.

7 Ways to Develop your Scholarly Identity                

1. According to Devin Soper the number one way to improve your online presence is to post your work to a public access site. Make your work accessible to your fellow researchers and the general community.  FSU’s research repository, DigiNole, is one of many amazing resources provided to FSU staff, students, and faculty by FSU libraries.  DigiNole allows you to post most work that has been published or presented at conferences or symposiums online for the world to view FOR FREE.  This is very important because professionals in the community may desperately want to apply your work to real-world problems.  If they can’t access your work, it can’t be used.  As you may know, many journals and funding agencies are moving in this direction, requiring work to be publically accessible.  Devin has a background in copyright and can tell you how to make your work available to the public without infringing on copyright laws.

2. Follow the Leaders! If you are unsure of which social media platforms to choose, look to the gurus in your field.  Which social media networks are they using?  Start following the leaders on different platforms, and then decide to start posting on only those relevant platforms that you enjoy the most.

3. Create Profiles! You can successfully sign up for multiple scholarly identity platforms with little maintenance, if you send viewers back to a main site or platform that you consistently maintain well.  Devin recommends three top scholarly identity networking sites: Acedemia.edu, Research Gate, and Google Scholar. 

4. Choose the mainstream social media sites that professionals in your research or creative areas use. Maybe your discipline uses Instagram because it’s more picture-based or Facebook because it’s more event-based.   Twitter is a top platform across most research areas, because it allows researchers to post nuggets of important information in a short amount of time, reaching a broad audience.  You can set up a twitter posting schedule, where you can spend one afternoon creating and scheduling twitter posts for the entire week or month.  Check out OPD on twitter @FSU_OPD!

5. Sign-up with ORCID! You need your research community to be able to differentiate your work from others with the same name.  ORCID provides researchers (and their associated work) with a persistent digital ID, especially important for researchers with common names. 

6. Make your work understandable to researchers outside of your field and to the general public. You must provide plain-language descriptions!  Devin recommends including two abstracts: the one with the science heavy information for your journal submission and a plain-language abstract to accompany work posted on public access sites.  Devin also recommends explaining your research using plain-language in a short video clip, perhaps using Youtube.  You should also add written statements to all of your online networking platforms in plain-language, understandable to the lay-person, about the significance of your work to the community or with the general publics’ interests in mind.

7. Check out the 30-day impact challenge (link below) to build a scholarly profile and then go back and decide which sites you want to use. http://blog.impactstory.org/impact-challenge-day-1-academia-edu/