Making research connections with social media

In Sri Lanka earlier this month I had the privilege to participate in two of INASP’s training courses. The first was training editors of journals on the Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) platform at the National Science Foundation. The second was part of an AuthorAID workshop at the University of Colombo’s Faculty of Medicine.

The topic for my section of both workshops was the same: making research connections with social media.

In the SLJOL workshop, my colleague Sioux Cumming introduced the new site for the SLJOL platform. The new site includes functionality for adding Twitter streams to the home pages of journals and also enables simple sharing of journal articles via various social media sites, as well as monitoring social media coverage.

The AuthorAID workshop, run by INASP Associate Barbara Gastel, was aimed at providing senior medical researchers with advice on mentoring and supervising more junior researchers, as well as communicating their research to a wider audience.

My session in both workshops shared some ideas and advice about using social media to promote research, either a researcher’s own work, or the papers in the journal they edit.

Details of what I discussed in these sessions, and advice on using social media can be found in this resource.