2012 China New Media Communication Association Annual Conference Macao International Conference

6-8 December 2012

Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly

Communication: a UK study

Yimei Zhu

Sociology PhD Student University of Manchester

Twitter: @yimeizhu http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com

Supervisor: Prof. Rob Procter

Introduction of my PhD project

My PhD thesis:

Are the new forms of scholarly communication the pathway to open science?

Open access to publication Open access to research data Using social media for scholarly communication

This PhD project is funded by Manchester eResearch Centre under the supervision of Professor Rob Procter.

This paper I’m presenting today is focused on using social media for scholarly communication based on a pilot study I’ve conducted with PhD students.

Scholarly communication

Scholarly communication, has been used as a broad term to cover all the activities and norms of academic research related to producing, exchanging and disseminating knowledge (Rieger 2010; Hahn et al 2011).

Social media tools has enabled a real-time communication and dissemination of scholarly contents (Procter et al 2010).

What’s there for PhD students?

Some Questions to consider: For PhD students and early career researchers, it’s important to

get your work done and publish in a reputable journal, as they have not secured professional status. Would the use of social media waste their time of doing ‘real’ research?

The Research Excellence Framework (REF), which are guidelines released by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), have not yet given credit to contents on the social media.

Can the adoption of new media tools benefit PhD students’ work and future career?

What strategies can be employed to maximise the impact of using social media?

Research Methods

Qualitative interviews :

Participant observation

Case study of #PhDchat

Interviews:By face-to-face, Skype and Emails

7 PhD students from various disciplines3 face-to-face interviews1 Skype interviews3 email interviews

Pilot interviews (June-Sep 2012)

IntervieweesUsers:Male, PhD student in EducationMale, PhD student in Life ScienceFemale, PhD student in Education Female, PhD student in BiologyFemale, PhD student in Sociology Non-users:Male, PhD student in PoliticsFemale, PhD student in Material Engineering

Talked to various researchers about their attitudes towards and experience of using social media in various social occasions

Created my own twitter account, Facebook page and academic blog, as well as playing around with a number of social media tools

I started using Twitter, Facebook page and blog for research related purpose

Participant observation

#phdchat was first set up in 2010 by a UK based PhD student and became a regular chat event on Twitter every Wednesday 7.30-8.30pm at British Standard Time

I joined in the conversation of Twitter #phdchat a few times and often used the hashtag in my tweets.

I analysed archive data of Tweets that includes #PhDchat from a topic called 'Blogging about your Research’ of 4 April and 20 June 2012.

Case studies of #phdchat

Results and Discussion

According to the participants in this study, current most commonly used social media tools to promote research:

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook groups and pages

Also used:Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Pinterest,

Mendeley, YouTube, Tumblr, Scoop.it and Pearltree, etc.

Blogs

Sites: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr or blogs hosted by their institutions

Content and Function of research blog: Promote published papers or abstracts for

conferences Used as a notebook to record thoughts &

progress Practise writing and reflecting Disseminate and gather information Networking & Getting feedback

Twitter

Disseminate information to a wide audience ‘I use Twitter to disseminate information, present things from

other network. Twitter is like a platform, connected to many other social media and websites. Twitter presents short summary.’ (Male, PhD student in Life Science)

Find information quickly

Used at conferences or before attending conferences

Facebook Group and Page

Facilitate an informal support network for researchers

Post information about conferences, workshops and work opportunities

Seek advices

Organise events

Difficulties and Potential problems

Fear of not being able to secure academic rewards, thus being very protective of their data

Worry of ideas being pinched or plagiarism

Content on social media being misused for inappropriate purposes

Lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain social media presence

Revealing too much personal information

Strategies used by participants

Link different social media sites for cross-platform promotion.

‘‘Linking each site to one another so that they’re updated automatically… I set up WordPress link to my Twitter which is linked to my Facebook page…So I cover both bases separately.” (Female, PhD student in Education)

Create a personal learning network (PLN):

‘A personal learning network (pln), can be defined as a collection of people and resources that guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.’ (Nielsen 2008)

Getting support from peers all across the globe

Build a professional online profile

‘Privacy issue: Have different identities on Twitter and Facebook

Having a Facebook page that fans can ‘like’ is a strategy of having a Facebook presence but using it for a professional purpose.

Interviewees all agree that they would not leak research findings on social media before going through traditional publication channel first.

Conclusion

New media tools, such as academic blogs, Twitter and Facebook, can be very helpful for PhD students and early career researchers to raise their profiles to an international audience.

There are difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives.

 Respondents from this study use various strategies to maximise the impact of their scholarly communication practice.

Future Work

An internet survey with UK academic researchers to obtain a representative sample

More follow-up-interviews and participant observation after the survey

Reference

Hahn, T., Burright, M. & Duggan, H. (2011). Has the revolution in scholarly communication lived up to its promise? American Society for Information Science and Technology, 37(5), 5.

HEFCE. (2012). Publication [Online]. Available: http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/ [Accessed 13 July 2012].

Nielsen, L. 2008. Developing Mentors from Your Personal Learning Network. The Innovative Educator [Online]. Available from: http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/developing-mentors-from-your-personal.html [Accessed 5 Sep 2012].

Procter, R., Williams, R., Stewart, J., Poschen, M., Snee, H., Voss, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M. (2010). Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 368(1926).

Rieger, O. Y. (2010). Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship. First Monday, 15(10).

If you are interested in my study, you can see my blog: http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com to see conference presentation slides

‘Shall we use social media for our research?’ Follow me on Twitter @yimeizhuFacebook Page:

www.facebook.com/yimeizhumanchester

Thank you!