As the New Year festivities inspire personal reflection, renewed productivity and exploration, the Impact of Social Sciences team has put together our five most popular How-to Guides of 2013. If you are looking to update your academic workflow to embrace more digitally-native practices, we are here to help!

Your essential ‘how-to’ guide to using Prezi in an academic environment

Presentation boredom can be a significant barrier to academic communication. Ned Potter provides guidance on the strengths and weaknesses of Prezi as a fresh approach to the PowerPoint doldrums. Prezi favours a non-linear format which also allows for more self-guided autonomy for viewers. But Prezi isn’t brilliant for accessibility and the whizzy technology can interfere with what you’re trying to say. Helpful tips are provided on how to get the most out of the interactive features.

Best Practice for Tagging Academic Notes

In conjunction with our post on using Evernote for knowledge mobilization, Allan Johnson provides some useful guidance on establishing an efficient tagging workflow to make the most out of online note-taking and project management. In practice, tagging can become an extremely helpful way to get to the information you need and to spot previously unrecognised relationships between ideas.

Using Google Hangouts for Higher Education blogs and workshops

Much has been written about the ways that Twitter and Facebook can be used by academics and research groups as part of strategies to disseminate their work and increase their online visibility, but what else is out there? Google+ and its video chat service Google Hangouts offer enormous potential for academics and researchers to connect and collaborate, writes Amy Mollett as she shares some of the ways that LSE Review of Books plans to use this new social platform.

Opening up your research: a guide to self-archiving

Making your research available on open access services increases citation and helps ensure greater impact, argues Deborah Lupton. In this post she has advice for sociologists in particular on different ways to self-archive, formatting and how to overcome barriers such as complex copyright legislation.

How to find an appropriate research data repository.

As more and more funders and journals adopt data policies that require researchers to deposit underlying research data in a data repository, the question over where to store this data and how to choose a repository becomes more and more important. Heinz Pampel is one of the people behind re3data.org, an Open Science tool that helps researchers to easily identify a suitable repository for their data and thus comply to requirements set out in data policies.