Online Presence for Researches: Using websites & social media for knowledge dissemination, collaboration, and profile raising (while still having time for your research)

Developing an online presence is increasingly important for researchers in all areas, particularly in interdisciplinary fields where collaborative research teams and new modes of knowledge dissemination are vital to scholarly success. Access to social media, blogging, digital publishing, and website building tools has made it easy for researchers to construct an online presence for themselves or their research team. However, the proliferation of digital tools and academic social media sites, like Academia.edu and ResearchGate, has made it difficult to decide which are worth investing in. This presentation will discuss why you might develop an online presence as a researcher, how you can use it to build your reputation, and how to maintain it, while still having time to do your research. Approaching this topic from the perspectives of both an individual Librarian researcher and the head of a microbiology research lab, we will compare common online tools, platforms, and social media services to identify opportunities for researchers from diverse disciplines and research cultures. We use our own research websites to illustrate how and why we chose the digital elements we use (ORCiD, Google Scholar, Flickr, Twitter, Wix/SquareSpace/Wordpress, etc.) and how they connect to our institutions’ websites