Now that research is developing an online presence, thoughts are turning to how to maximise this. Brian Kelly investigates linking strategies; from Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu and Mendeley to a researcher’s online publications, as a way of increasing researcher visibility among their digitally-literate peers.
I’m pleased to say that a paper by myself and Jenny Delasalle, Academic Services Manager (Research) at the University of Warwick, which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” was presented recently as a poster presentation at the Open Repositories conference. This paper, which is available from the University of Bath institutional repository, is based on work initially published on my blog.
A blog post entitled “How Researchers Can Use Inbound Linking Strategies to Enhance Access to Their Papers” published earlier this year described an Inbound linking strategy to get to the top listing on google fast. It occurred to me that my willingness to make use of researcher profiling services such as Academia.edu, ResearcherID, Scopus, Researchergate, Mendeley, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations may have helped to enhance the visibility of my research papers which are hosted in the University of Bath repository. The blog post went on to describe how I found that I was author of 15 of the most downloaded papers in the repository from my department.
More recent investigations reveal that, as illustrated, I have the largest number of downloads of any author at the University of Bath! This was recently brought to the attention of the PVC for Research who, in a departmental meeting, informed me that a University of Bath Research Group had discussed these figures and asked me to share the approaches with other researchers at Bath. In response I mentioned that the approaches I’d taken, the evidence I’d gathered, the hypothesis I had proposed for explaining the evidence, possible alternative hypotheses, the limitations of the approaches, the implications of the findings and areas for further work had been submitted to the Open Repositories 2012 conference – and if the paper was accepted the findings would be available to all, and not just researchers at my host institution.
The paper explores other possible reasons for the high visibility of these papers – and one possibility worthy of further investigation is the provision of many papers in HTML formats and not just PDF and MS Word. However the use of popular researcher profiling services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu are felt to be worth recommending to researchers in order (a) to ensure that their research papers can be more easily found by their peers on these services and (b) so that links to the paper on their institutional repository can enhance the visibility to Google of the papers as well as enhancing the Google ranking of the repository itself.
Of course it probably needs to be said that that the number of downloads is not necessarily an indicator of quality. However the converse is also true: just because a paper in a repository is seldom viewed does not indicate that it must be a great paper! I am quite happy to promote the use of such approaches since increased numbers of views, especially for the target communities, can help to both embed the ideas given in the papers by practitioners and increase the likelihood that the papers will be cited by other researchers. In my case I’m pleased that, according to Google Scholar Citations, my most cited papers have been cited 87, 67, 54 and 40 times.
My co-author Jenny Delasalle has been investigating use of researcher profiling service at the University of Warwick, her host institution. It was interesting that in Jenny’s research she found that a number of commercial publishers encourage their authors to use services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu to link to their papers hosted behind the publishers paywalls – and yet we are not seeing institutional views of the benefits of coordinated use of such services by their researchers. Institutional repository managers, research support staff and librarians could be prompting their institutions to make the most of these externally provided services, to enhance the visibility of their researchers’ work in institutional repositories.
Surely it is time for the research community to develop inbound linking strategies to their research work, especially as this can be done so simply. These ideas are summerised in this slide show.
Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
This is an edited version of an article originally posted on Brian Kelly’s personal blog, UK Web Focus.
Brian Kelly
Brian Kelly works for the JISC-funded Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN, University of Bath. His job title is UK Web Focus. In this role he has responsibility for supporting innovative uses of the Web and sharing best practices. Brian’s UK Web Focus blog was launched in 1996 and has a high profile in sharing thoughts on Web developments. The blog is an open notebook, averaging about 4 posts per week (1,090+ posts in total). This is complemented by Brian’s @briankelly Twitter account which provides a tool for engagement and dissemination.
Dear Brian,
It is interesting that you have selected LinkedIn and Academia.edu as the focus for your research and comments. I came across your blog article, I should add, by way of a Twitter reTweet.
As a businessman, rather than an academic, I have used LinkedIn since its earliest days (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=1240035&authType=name&authToken=_myh&locale=en_US&pvs=pp&trk=ppro_viewmore). I was also a very early convert to SKYPE (when running a research based business out of Mumbai), and Facebook, all from a commercial user’s perspective.
I am somewhat newer to Academia.edu, having started to use its services in 2012. Nevertheless, I (on behalf of MarineLives, the not-for-profit project I co-direct) have used Academia.edu successfully as a repository of material (e.g. https://www.academia.edu/4087032/Colin_Greenstreet_and_Jill_Wilcox_Digital_Humanities_and_Technical_partnership_a_Discussion_Document_July_23rd_2013), but the material is publicised elsewhere. In particular, through Twitter. If you are interested, we would be happy to share a recent analysis we have made of our Twitter followership, and (most importantly) those Twitter followers (and occasional readers of our Tweets), who actively promote our material. This analysis looks at the degree of overlap between our followership, and the followership of our followers. It looks at the build-up of our followership over time, and provides some case studies, in terms of retweets and mentions of our material, and how this then impacts on views of our content on our wikis, and downloads and/or views of documents on Academia.edu.
I would find it interesting to hear your thoughts more broadly on social media strategies for individual researchers and for institutions (if the researchers are attached to institutions or other groups).
Having run several kinds of start-up commercial business, I am familiar with the need to establish a presence in different knowledge based activities, and to market myself and my company (or institution) to potential clients. Now, as the founder, and co-director of the entirely volunteer project, MarineLives (myself included), I have the challenge of developing a personal academic presence, and no-bricks-and-mortar institutional presence for the academic/public historian collaborative project I co-direct.
We have recently reviewed our social media strategy, concentrating on our use of Facebook, Twitter, and our own blog (TheShippingNews). In our review, we mention in passing our use of Academia.edu. You can see our review of social media strategy at: http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2013/11/24/communicating-marinelives/
It is these media, especially Twitter and our Blog, which we have found most useful to establish a presence (and academic image). LinkedIn is frankly not well suited to the educational or charitable world. Academia.edu has potential, but suffers from a weak business model. Just look at how post public flotation, LinkedIn has been able to invest in enhanced technical capabilities with real utility. Academia.edu, though modelled on Facebook, has failed to generate the intensity of member exchange of data which it would need to monetize its services successfully. One feature, though, that I love on Academia.edu, is that it alerts you to Google searches of your profile, and which country these searches were made from. A handy way to monitor academic reach in terms of communication.
My recommendation to aspirational early career academics (I speak as a 56 year old without a PhD, but, heaven help me with an Harvard MBA), is that, whatever their research interests, they should be imaginative and develop a communications strategy which suits their personal style and needs.
Our MarineLives’ collaborations with Bath Spa University, and with the Universities of Mannheim and Ancona, formed in 2013, have all originated in connections made through a discussion of MarineLives’ content publicised on Twitter, and self-published on our suite of wikis (e.g. http://annotatehca1372.wikispot.org/), our main website (http://marinelives.org/), and our blog (http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/). Likewise, our very recent explorations of potential collaborations, in 2014, with academics at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Pennsylvania, have been nurtured through sharing of content via Twitter.
Which brings me to my conclusion. Content is King and Queen. If your content hides behind copyright walls, or repository walls, or is somehow less than instantaneous to access, you are putting barriers between you and your potential audience, supporters and contributors. As a entirely volunteer based initiative, total funding £1500 for 18 months to produce a current corpus of 2 million transcribed and partially annotated and linked words, audience is good, supporters are better, and contributors are GREAT. We make all our content available under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Unsurprisingly, we have found that when our communications (whether through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, texts, or face-to-face) have offered immediate access to good content, we get a response – offers to help, reTweets, conference invites, and interest in collaborating.
So my advice to users of Academia.edu, LinkedIn, and other social media, is stop those “Ghost Postings”, in which you post the name of your paper, or conference presentation, and no content, or in which you post a frustrating abstract (because your paper is with a commercial academic publisher). It may enhance your “view” statistics, but it is nonsense in terms of true communication and engagement.
Content is the basis of real communication. It shows what you and your institution can do; its sharing will produce unpredictable and serendipitous benefits; and it is a public good.
Oh, the joys of not having to chase tenure.
Best regards,
Colin Greenstreet
Co-director, MarineLives
London