Academic social media

[PI]

All,
I have not been very active in twitter, ResearchGate or Linkedin or facebook. I am considering twitter.
As a faculty member, I don't see a great deal of benefit from Linkedin- which seems to be more for students trying to get jobs etc.
I have an account of ResearchGate which I am not maintaining. I am in STEM - R1 University. I see many of my colleagues being very active on all of these. My research does not seem to have suffered because I didn't participate in these.. Perhaps I could boost my lab's recruitment potential with these?

I would love to hear your experiences with these and which of these benefitted you most overall. Which ones did you get tired of quickly?
One issue I see with Linkedin is that you may feel obliged to  "accept" connection with anyone who requests.. More connections the better it seems if you decide to use the platform.

[born_a_prof]

I am also at R1-STEM. Twitter is useful for popularizing one's research, the top journals in my field actually track retweets of the papers and show them prominently on their website.
I should say though I have seen way too many PIs getting sucked into moral/ethical debates and ending up getting "cancelled/witch hunted" because their opinion was deemed controversial. So caveat  emptor. Famously of course Salaita but too many recent examples.

I just stick to sharing my work and retweeting others' papers. Maybe after tenure I will start giving more hot takes.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Twitter is useful for popularizing one's research, the top journals in my field actually track retweets of the papers and show them prominently on their website.
I should say though I have seen way too many PIs getting sucked into moral/ethical debates and ending up getting "cancelled/witch hunted" because their opinion was deemed controversial. So caveat  emptor. Famously of course Salaita but too many recent examples.

I just stick to sharing my work and retweeting others' papers. Maybe after tenure I will start giving more hot takes.

This is my experience with twitter as well. It is useful for sharing research and I've made a few connections through it, but I don't use it much and the most prolific tweeters can be quite annoying.

The other sites are useless for academics imo, although I have accounts on several of them.

[Hibush]

I am also at R1-STEM. Twitter is useful for popularizing one's research, the top journals in my field actually track retweets of the papers and show them prominently on their website.
I should say though I have seen way too many PIs getting sucked into moral/ethical debates and ending up getting "cancelled/witch hunted" because their opinion was deemed controversial. So caveat  emptor. Famously of course Salaita but too many recent examples.

I just stick to sharing my work and retweeting others' papers. Maybe after tenure I will start giving more hot takes.

A lot of the academic twitterverse seems to be pre-tenure scientist who are trying to raise their visibility in the field. We just hired one with thousands of followers.

I have two non-intersecting research efforts, and each has its own twitter handle, followers and followings.

A Salaita event unlikely for two reasons. They stick to their knitting, as it were. All the activity is related to the research topic. Also, there's no reason to go negative. If someone else publishes a paper in the field that I think is crap, I don't trash them on Twitter.

[Parasaurolophus]

I think a lot depends on what social media are already being used by lots of other people in your subfield, or your professional associations. If a lot of them are using FB, then use that. If it's Twitter, then you're stuck with that.

My main professional association primarily communicates with members via the FB page, and there's a pretty well-developed FB architecture that's being used by them. So that's where I engage with them, too. There's not a ton of Twittering going on, so I don't use Twitter, and I don't miss it. ResearchGate and LinkedIn are used even less, so I don't even think about them.

[polly_mer]

I think a lot depends on what social media are already being used by lots of other people in your subfield, or your professional associations. If a lot of them are using FB, then use that. If it's Twitter, then you're stuck with that.

This is true where I am.  More than a decade ago, the assertions were that the social networks would change how new folks were integrated.  What happened in fact was the people with influence and power continued to network through personal contacts during visits and coffee at conferences.  Thus, while people of my generation could have built professional networks through social media, we instead built our professional networks in the same old-school way of sharing offices and being introduced around at conferences and visits.

Practically nothing is done through social media that matters in any of my fields.  The only exception is the sharing for teaching intro physics at high school and college levels.  Those folks tend to be isolated and need to interact through non-in-person means.

The research itself is still done through publications in the relevant journals with colleagues emailing articles with notes like "This is my new one, as we discussed last week".  It's been painful this year to have almost no conferences with the standard hallway chats and all the group breakfasts/coffees/lunches/teas/dinners to catch up with farflung colleagues.

My LinkedIn etc. contacts are much more used to ensure I still have good contact info as people move affiliations much more than reading whatever someone shares. More than once in the past quarter, I have sent a message through LinkedIn as "Could I get your new email/phone?  I have questions about the topic we discussed last time I saw you because of something I saw this week".

[fizzycist]

I am on Twitter and linkedin. Mostly use them for fun and to relieve pandemic boredom. And to cheer on my friends, former trainees, random colleagues, etc. Not everything has to be for professional gain.

The ppl who use those platforms only to advertise their work and open positions end up looking a little narcissistic to me. But I wouldn't be surprised if it still gives them a small professional boost.

Just looked up Salaita. Wow. I rarely feel sorry for ppl who say awful things and get 'canceled' but that case looks really bad.

[Katrina Gulliver]

I use twitter for a mix of personal/professional stuff, and LinkedIn for professional stuff only.
I'll agree that LI is not of the greatest use for most academics, but it is more useful in admin roles - and I have used it to reach out to people for informational interviews etc. I do non-academic work/consulting sometimes and people have found me through LI.

[jerseyjay]

I am a historian. I am not sure how much of value happens in social media to begin with.

I have a LinkedIn account. I set it up more than a decade ago and I use it mainly to keep in touch with non-academic contacts (professionals like accountants, former colleagues outside of academia, former students).

I have a Twitter account, but I rarely use it. To the extent I follow anybody it is libraries and archives. I have a new book coming out and I will probably tweet information about any speeches or presentations I have. Many historians use Twitter for the same reason President Trump does--although of course they do not usually have Trump's views. I try to stay away from Twitter.

I have a ResearchGate account. I don't really know why. I find it is slightly slower than Google Scholar to let me know when somebody cites me, and it is useless for letting me know about things that I might be interested in. Sometimes I get requests for full-text copies of my research, which I handle on a case-by-case basis.

I have an Academia account, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not. It seems to be more useful for hooking up with scholars outside of the U.S.

I do not have a FaceBook or MySpace account, and refuse to do so.

I try to spend less than 15 minutes a day on all these various accounts, and to be honest, if they were to disappear, I would not complain. That said, I know people who swear by social media as a way to keep up with colleagues, the field, etc. I also have to admit that I tend to be a bit anti-social, and I do not like to go to more than one or two conferences a year (before Covid obviously). So people who are more social may find social media more useful than I do.

[Katrina Gulliver]

I didn't want to start a new thread for this, but I've noticed a few vocal grad students setting out to critique the work of senior scholars on twitter.
I saw one just the other day, going after a book (which tbf I've never read, because it's not my subfield - but I've heard of it, such is the prominence of the author). The comment, at the end of a multi-tweet thread, was "Does ANYONE think this DOESN'T SUCK?".

And I'm thinking, yeah, the author - who is a BIG WHEEL, in a notoriously bitchy and nepotistic field.

The student isn't my student, so it's not my problem - but I'm thinking "is this how they're expecting to make their way up?" By trashing big names in public? (yikes).

[ab_grp]

Bacardiandlime, I have seen that on the rise as well.  I don't know if grad students or other ECRs are trying to "make their bones" in this fashion, but it often seems like a bad idea to me.  Critical analysis is one thing, but these immature antics are a disturbing trend.  Hopefully their mentors will counsel them on their approach.

[Kron3007]

The thing is that you may never really know the impact they have.  It is unlikely that any of them will lead to anybobvious event, but they all contribute to getting your research out there.

I use research gate and linkedin, but am not overly active on either.  I don't bother with Twitter or Instagram as it seems like too much work, but some of my students do use them.  One thing I will say is that research gate and linkedin have both made me aware of research and developments I otherwise would not have known about, so that is good.  A lot of people have also accessed my work through RG, so that is also good

One of the main reasons I do these is actually for the benefit of my students. I think having an active online lab presence helps them in their networking and future prospects more than any direct benefit for me.

[Kron3007]

Bacardiandlime, I have seen that on the rise as well.  I don't know if grad students or other ECRs are trying to "make their bones" in this fashion, but it often seems like a bad idea to me.  Critical analysis is one thing, but these immature antics are a disturbing trend.  Hopefully their mentors will counsel them on their approach.

It's funny, we recently published a paper stating that some previous published work was junk (not in so many words), but it was based on data and done as a publication.  Even with this, I don't know if it is a great move politically.  They are a big name , but it is fairly well known in the field that some of their work is questionable.  We are just the first to publish the counter-results, which could back fire but I felt had to be done (people are wasting a lot of money based on their data).

However, doing it over twitter would never be a good call.

[mamselle]

I have a LinkedIn account. I barely use it. I should probably update it since I get congrats for anniversaries at jobs I left awhile ago...I guess the end dates didn't "take" somehow.

I have a Twitter account for my historical tours. (Of course, I was doing more with it when I was actually giving tours.) This year, not so much, but I also follow others who tweet out tiny reasearch-bites almost daily, which I enjoy seeing. Occasionally they offer a lovely manuscript page or worthwhile factual tidbit for my own work, too.

I have an Academia account which gets a lot of international action: mostly downloading of my abstracts and a few very old articles. I reply each time someone does so with an invitation to connect further, but few do so. I've considered using it to house a couple of languishing pieces that I think are decent but don't seem to be getting published.

I abhor and eschew Facebook. The first time I saw its setup, I said, "That's a huge potential time sink--not going there!" So I haven't.

This site, on the other hand, and its ancestor the Old Forum, I have found to be mostly rewarding and (excepting Job's 4 comforters) positively supportive.

No-other social media I know of has led to meet-ups on two continents, conference participation, research help, worship opportunities, and long-lasting friendships, even among those who don't post anymore.

M.

[Katrina Gulliver]

Bacardiandlime, I have seen that on the rise as well.  I don't know if grad students or other ECRs are trying to "make their bones" in this fashion, but it often seems like a bad idea to me.  Critical analysis is one thing, but these immature antics are a disturbing trend.  Hopefully their mentors will counsel them on their approach.

It's funny, we recently published a paper stating that some previous published work was junk (not in so many words), but it was based on data and done as a publication.  Even with this, I don't know if it is a great move politically.  They are a big name , but it is fairly well known in the field that some of their work is questionable.  We are just the first to publish the counter-results, which could back fire but I felt had to be done (people are wasting a lot of money based on their data).

However, doing it over twitter would never be a good call.

Yes, if the student had written a critical review for an academic journal, that would be one thing (though as you say perhaps not wise!), but even so I'd assume that would be more nuanced than "EVERYONE THINKS THIS SUCKS!!". And of course an academic journal would be unlikely to assign Prof BigName's book to some random grad student anyway.