Researcher Networks
Below are a few of the more
widely-used interdisciplinary, scholarly networking tools. Being part of a
network may help you find collaborators and publicize your work more widely.
Discipline-specific online networking communities also exist.
- ResearchGate
Social
network for scientists enabling sharing of research, collaboration, and some
altmetrics. It also has active Q and A forums where you can get help and
advice.
- Academia.edu
Network
for researchers to share research and discover research being done by
others.
- LinkedIn
Social networking tool for professionals in all fields. A LinkedIn profile
is similar to an online CV. You can search LinkedIn for people in particular
fields of work or with a particular affiliation.
- Mendeley
Known
also as a citation management tool, Mendeley includes a social networking
element. Researchers can create profiles and build and share their libraries of
citations. Mendeley tracks how often citations are saved to libraries as a type
of altmetric.
More on networking for
researchers:
Boosting Your Altmetrics
In addition to using your
networks to raise awareness of your research and publications, here are other
tips and tools:
Use an Author Identifier
Using an author ID will help
distinguish you from other authors with similar names and will make sure that
all your research output is grouped together - both good steps in broadening
your impact. Registering for an ORCID
identifier is a great place to start!
MedEdPortal
- MedEdPortal
MedEdPORTAL is a free
peer-reviewed publishing venue and dissemination portal designed to support
educators and learners as they create and use on-line teaching materials,
assessment tools and faculty development resources.
Visualizing Imact
Software, programming libraries,
and other tools that can be used for visualizing research impact:
- Science of Science (Sci2) Network
Visualization Tool (free)
A modular toolset specifically designed
for the study of science. It supports the temporal, geospatial, topical, and
network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets at the micro
(individual), meso (local), and macro (global) levels. For the Sci2 manual,
please
see
this link.
- Gephi (free)
An interactive visualization
and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic
and hierarchical graphs. Works in synergy with Sci2 for complex
analyses
- D3.js (free)
D3.js (Data-Driven Documents)
is a JavaScript library that allows you to create and control dynamic and
interactive graphs in a modern web browser. It makes use of common web
standards such as SVG, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for data
visualization.
- VOSviewer (free)
VOSviewer is an
application that can be used to create, view and explore maps based on network
data. VOSviewer is primarily intended to be used for analyzing bibliometric
networks. The program can for instance be used to create maps of publications,
authors, or journals based on a co-citation network or to create maps of
keywords based on a co-occurrence network.
- Rimpact (free)
Rimpact is
an example of how you can write custom code to parse and analyze bibliographic
records and generate visualization graphs for research impact. Rimpact was
written in the Ruby programming language, but the concept can be applied to any
programming language you are familiar with.
New forms of scholarly publishing
Researchers can share their work
in a variety of non-traditional ways online.
- Figshare
Figshare
allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser
so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets
can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does
not allow.
- SlideShare
This
free online tool for uploading and sharing slide presentations can also track
the number of downloads as an alternative measure of research
impact.
- Vimeo
Vimeo is a free online service for sharing and uploading video
content.
- WordPress
Free
web-based software for creating blogs and websites
- Twitter
Twitter
allows sharing links and short messages with a large online community.
Frequently, Twitter is used as a communication tool within research communities
and as a tool to connect with potential collaborators at professional
conferences and meetings.
Research Impact Beyond Published Articles
There are several initiatives to
try to develop reward systems that recognize researchers' contributions beyond
their publications in 'top' journals. Here are a few:
- Rapid
Science's "C-Score"
A collaboration score that will attempt to measure
"participants contributions to discovery processes that require robust
group involvement"
- Publons
A
way to record and showcase your peer review contributions
Related Topic: Broader Impacts
Addressing the 'broader impacts'
of your research is a requirement for some grants, like the
National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
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