There are many opportunities for you to share your research outside of the published literature. Web tools can help you to search, communicate, collaborate, organise and disseminate your research effectively. They are useful both for showcasing your own research and for finding potential collaborators working in related fields throughout the world. Here we provide some information about some of the more popular tools available to aid you in managing your online presence. This list is by no means exhaustive.
*Please note that unless stated these tools are not formally supported by QMUL*
Figshare is an online digital repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs. It is free to upload content and free to access. Users can upload files in any format and items are given a DOI. See further information about preserving your data.
Impact Story is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products--traditional ones like journal articles, but also alternative products like blog posts, datasets, and software. The output is displayed in a single, permalinked report.
Altmetric.com is a service for institutions and researchers. It collects mentions of scholarly articles from social media sites, newspapers, magazines, government policy documents and more. A free bookmarklet can be downloaded and used by individual researchers to see how much attention an article got online.
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. Over 24,000,000 academics have signed up. You will need an academic email stem (i.e. @qmul.ac.uk) to be able to create a profile. Users create a profile that positions them in a family tree structure of their affiliated institution. Queen Mary has a presence on this service, with a number of staff already subscribed.
ResearchGate is a social networking tool for the research community. Once registered it will find material you have published online, send you emails to ask you if the work is yours and if you would like to upload it. ResearchGate asks you to upload the actual article, rather than simply linking to an existing online version of the work. Whilst it does provide some information about what your publisher permits you to do with the version of the work you are uploading there is no moderation and it is easy to make work available in contravention of the publisher's policy so please be aware of this. There does tend to be a science focus amongst the ResearchGate community, though researchers from all disciplines do participate.
Twitter is a great tool for networking in your academic community. You can use hashtags to discover important news and other active scholars in your field. They can also help others to discover you so that you're engaging with your larger academic community. It is also increasingly common for conferences to have an associated hashtag and live-tweeting conferences is a great academic service for those who can't attend.
Professor Dorothy Bishop, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford has written a useful guide: A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic.
Here are a few easy steps you can take to raise the visibility of your research and help to disseminate it more widely: