Welcome to our Guide to Social Media for Research. This aims to show how different social media applications can help at all stages of the academic research process.
Ever thought of.............
Following a conference remotely via Twitter?
Promoting your research on YouTube?
Setting up a wiki to collaborate with other researchers?
Using Facebook to involve the public with your work?
Keeping your literature search up-to-date with newsfeeds?
The possibilities are endless.... What's more, social media is flexible, free (usually) and fun.
However, social media operates very differently to traditional scholarly communication, so there are important things to consider before you leap in.
Our guide aims to point you in the right direction. We've illustrated it with real-life examples, and linked to helpful tips and advice for an academic audience. Want to explore topics in more depth? We've collected useful resources to help you do just that.
Click on the tabs along the top to go to each section and explore the researchers' showcase.
Feeling enthused? On the right hand side of each section, you'll find links to help you try things out for yourself.
Social media is a fast-moving, ever-expanding area. Therefore, this guide just highlights a selection of resources, particularly those which are well-used by researchers, are free, and relatively stable.
More comprehensive lists can be found in our bookmarks collection in each section, but please do let us know if you have any other recommendations!
How to get personal information from complete strangers....
Using this guide, you'll see how social media can help you at all stages of your research: from exploration to engagement, from planning to publicising, and much more.
An academic's life on social media. This prezi is open to anyone to edit.
Social media can help with your professional development as a researcher, with the potential to enhance many of the skills included in the Vitae Researcher Development Framework.
With ready access to a vast range of people and data, social media offers much potential for conducting research. However, the ethical framework relating to research using social media has not been very well-developed, and there are still many questions for a would-be social media researcher to ponder.
We hope to add more useful links here in due course: if you know of any, please let us know.
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