[Emily]
Alright, welcome, everyone, to "Getting Noticed: tips and tricks for building and promoting your scholarly identity." My name is Emily Carlisle-Johnston. I'm a Research and Scholarly Communications Librarian at Western libraries, and I'm joined today by my colleagues Courtney and Sarah, who are also part of the Research and Scholarly Communications team at Western Libraries.

13Today we're going to be talking about scholarly identity, or scholarly ID, and in particular, we're going to discuss what a scholarly ID is and why you should have one. In doing so we'll also be talking about two elements of your scholarly ID and online presence, in particular those being your record of research and your social media presence.

So I'm just going to dive right in. Starting with what is a scholarly ID? And I'm actually going to put that question to you. Those of you who are here, what comes to mind when you hear scholarly ID? What does this term mean for you, or what do you associate with it? Please feel free to share your ideas in the chat, and I'll give you a few moments, just to type some words or a sentence that come to mind.

"Your research area" is one comment that we have here. Okay. Anything else come to mind?

"Academic success" is another comment..."An online visibility." Yeah, I think these are all things that are related. 

"Works published." Absolutely. Absolutely.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas that come to mind. 

So, for purposes of this presentation, or this workshop, we define your scholarly identity (scholarly ID) as what people find about you when they search online. It's the presentations and publications, the research interests, the fellowships and grants, the courses or workshops taught. Basically, all of the things that fellow researchers or students or potential employers would find if they searched for you online. And I think that's what a lot of you are getting at in your comments as well.

So why is it important? Well, your scholarly ID signals to the fellow researchers, students or potential employers what you've done, what you are doing and what you could potentially do in the future. And because the internet already knows a lot about you and the work that you've done, your scholarly identity already exists in some capacity. What's up to you is whether or not you want to manage and promote your identity to tell your own story, or whether you wish to just let Google continue doing what it's currently doing for you.

If you're here today I'm going to assume that you fall into the first category, so you're interested in learning more about how to manage and promote your identity.

Today's goal, then, is to help you make informed and intentional decisions about if and how you might manage and promote your scholarly identity. And to do that, as I mentioned previously, we're going to talk about two aspects that encompass a scholarly identity: scholarly identity as a record of your research, and scholarly identity as how or whether you have a research presence on social media to build and manage your reputation.

Now, as we'll discuss today, these two elements can take many forms and encompass many tools, as shown on this slide. The section on the right of this slide with the green boxes focuses in on the different global and local identifiers that relate to your record of research. The section on the left, in blue, is more about social networking and your social media presence...and the different options that exist in that space. Now, I recognize that if you're looking at this slide, it looks like a lot, and that's intentional because there are a lot of options and tools when it comes to managing your scholarly identity. That's why the topic merits of workshop like this. Personally, I don't think it would be reasonable to expect that after today, you'll adopt and maintain your scholarly identity with all of these different methods and tools that are shown on the graphic.

My goal is to help you prioritize what you spend your time on, based on your own personal goals, and the features of the different tools that we're going to talk about.

Okay, so that's a general overview. 

I'm going to dive in to your record of research now. but I do want to pause and just check if there are any questions or comments about a scholarly ID and the definition that we've talked about before we move forward. If you do have a question, you can hop on the mic, if you're comfortable, or just post it in the chat.

Alright, so I'm seeing no comments or questions right now but I do want to remind you that if anything comes up as I'm talking, feel free to just post it right in the chat and Courtney or Sarah will address it.

So, record of research. when I say record of research, I mean an online record or collation of your research outputs and other scholarly achievements.

And one way to create an online record of research is with a research identifier. A research identifier is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. These are not to be confused with DOIs or PubMed IDs, for example, which are typically used to distinguish discrete research outputs, like articles, books, and data sets. You may be familiar with those, but a research identifier is different. It is used to disambiguate names. We know that there are very few unique names in the world, meaning that a research identifier would distinguish one Mr. John Smith from another Mr. John Smith, or it would distinguish me from every other Emily Carlisle in the world.

I know some of you may have heard of Orcid, which is one example of a research identifier.
It stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, and it is free, open source, nonprofit and interoperable with other systems like Researcher ID, LinkedIn, and Scopus. And the fact that it's interoperable with the systems means that you can push your publications and research outputs from one system to another for easy auto-population. So there is less work and maintenance required on your end to keep your profile or profiles, up to date.

 And if you apply for grants with NSERC and CIHR, these funding agencies recognize an ORCID ID is valuable and so they allow you to include it in your application as a way of making your record of research visible to them.

So that's a general overview of ORCID, but I'm actually going to sit back for a few moments and let you watch this video, which speaks to many of the reasons that an ORCID ID could be valuable for you.

[Video]
Meet Sofia Maria Hernandez Garcia. She is an active and accomplished scholar in her field. She does research, writes and publishes, teaches, speaks at conferences...the things that most researchers and scholars do throughout their career. She has done her work at several different organizations, and has been fortunate to receive grants to support her research. Sophia wants to concentrate her time and energy on her scholarship, though sometimes things get in the way. 

Funding organizations want to review her past work before making an award. Her institution needs her to provide a complete list of her works for her promotion review. Potential collaborators are trying to figure out if she is the Sophia Garcia they're looking for. The internet, repositories, and other resources can help answer some of these questions, but they all have the same core challenge. They attempt to link research activities and researchers based on the spelling of a person's name. As individual as we each are, our names are actually not that unique. Even in the same field or institution, there can be others with similar or even the exact same name, and they can get even worse if you consider all of the potential variations of a name. Names can change over time, are sometimes expressed in different ways in different situations or languages. So when someone searches for Sophia, they may or may not find all, and only the things that can be attributed to her work.

Today many institutions and agencies solve this problem with paperwork. They ask Sophia to fill in forms, to list her works, and include her affiliations and funding history. Some may even ask her to list her collaborators along with their past work, affiliations, and funding. What is related to Sophia's work and what is not? There has to be a better way.

Orcid IDs are unique and persistent identifiers specifically for researchers, analysts and scholars. With an Orcid ID, Sophia can clarify what activities are hers, regardless of how her name is expressed. Sophia registered for a free ID at the orcid.org website. Orcid is a nonprofit organization that allows our users to control what data are linked to their identifier, and how those data are made public, shared with a limited group, or made private. The community may access data made public by our users for no fee, and also attach it to her organization and any new public research activity she engages in, such as publishing a paper, releasing a data set, or applying for a grant.

With the ID attached to her activities, it makes it easier for people, institutions, and systems to figure out which activities are Sophia's, even if her name doesn't always appear in the same way, distinguishing her from others with the same or similar name.

Orcid IDs are collected and used internationally by many institutions, including publishers, repositories, professional associations, universities, funders and research organizations. In addition to attaching her ID to new activities, Sofia can allow these organizations to read her Orchid record to get her already curated list of past activities. Best of all, if Sophia leaves her current institution, the ID travels with her, along with the list of all of her past activities. She can continue to use the same ID throughout her career, even if she changes employers, moves to another country, or starts to do work in another field.

By linking the Orcid ID to her work when submitting a manuscript, applying for a grant, or registering for a meeting, Sofia ensures that the organization she works with can get the information they need with less paperwork for her. It means people will find all and only her work when they search the internet. Sophia can spend her time concentrating on what matters most and that makes her very happy. 

Get your Orcid ID today. It only takes 30 seconds to register for one and it's completely free. Orcid...connecting research and researchers.
[End of video]

[Emily]
Alright, so that is a summary of Orcid IDs, and this slide shows what it looks like in practice. On this slide, you are looking at a snapshot of my colleague Kristin's Orcid page from back in 2019. So on the right hand side, we see that in addition to her record of employment, there is a record of her research. So it's showing 14 of her works, which are linked to directly from this page.

Now, all of these works are connected to the number on the left hand side of the page... underneath Kristin's name. That number is her Orcid ID: it is the persistent identifier that says that this profile and all of these works are by my colleague, Kristin Hoffman. They are by no other Kristen in the world.

Kristan's Orcid profile, and your Orcid profile by extension, can include any type of information object and research output that you can think of. That means a book, a book chapter and article. But it also means: did you publish a data set? An encyclopedia entry? A magazine article? Those are all things that you can also add to your profile and tie to your Orcid ID to give people a complete view of your work and your interests as a scholar.
And if you're curious about learning more about the supported work types, on an Orcid profile, then the link on this slide lists all of those for you to look at.

So, in summary, a research identifier, and in particular an Orcid ID, has a number of benefits for you. It lets you stand out, because it distinguishes your research from others with similar names, and because the ID stays with you even if you change names. When I got married, I added a hyphen to my last name, but everything that I did as Emily Carlisle is still connected to what I'm doing now as Emily Carlisle-Johnston through my Orcid profile.

It also lets you get credit for your work because, as I just mentioned, you can create a complete picture of your work that can be easily uncovered, including your publications, articles, media stories, exhibits. And this complete view can be used by funders like NSERC and CIHR, who are evaluating your grant applications.

It lets you take control of your privacy, because you get to determine what is publicly available and viewable to others. I'm not sure if you noticed on in the screenshot that I showed you of Kristen's Orcid profile, but Kristen didn't list where she went to school and what for.  And she didn't link to her social media accounts on her profile page, but she could have if she wanted to.

It also lets you work less because it supports automated linkages that reduce how much manual data entry you have to do to add your work to the profile. I've actually heard of cases where a researcher found out that their article was published because they got a notification that it was added to their Orcid ID, and at that point they hadn't even yet been informed by the editors of the journal that they published in that their work was published. So you can see that that's an example of them not really having to do any work to add that article to their profile.

It also lets you change institutions seamlessly because your profile and all the data there moves with you across organizations and around the world.

It lets you show off your collaboration, because it highlights your interactions with other organizations, publishers, and funders.

And finally, it lets you extend the reach of your work because it increases the recognition of your work, and the discoverability of your profile, all of which increase your chances of getting cited and people finding your work.

So that is an Orcid ID. Are there any questions on that before I move on to some other examples of research profiles? I'll just pause here in case any questions come up.

Alright. Seeing no questions, I am going to move on to the Scopus Author ID, because Orcid IDs are not the only researcher ideas out there. The Scopus Author ID is another example and some of you might be familiar with it. However, this isn't one that you need to register for yourself. Instead, you are automatically assigned an ID if you have a publication indexed in the Scopus database. So, that means that you'll only have a Scopus ID created once you publish in a journal that's indexed by Scopus. And even then, you can't attach publications from other sources to your Scopus Suthor ID, so it really just creates a record of your research within Scopus.

I also mentioned that Researcher ID is another example of a researcher identifier, and it has similar features to the Scopus Suthor ID, but it's a Web of Science identifier for publications that are indexed in Web of Science. I mention these two examples here more as an FYI than anything else, so that you know what it is if you have one created for you. But insofar as creating a complete scholarly ID for yourself, the Scopus Author ID and the Researcher ID aren't going to do that for you. They can, however, (and I mentioned this earlier), be linked to an Orcid ID, which does give a more complete picture of your scholarly activity.

Now another way to curate a record of your research is by creating a Google Scholar profile. A Google Scholar profile is what my colleagues like to call the "bang for your buck" profile because it's a very simple way of collating your publications, and the citations to your publications, so that others can find your work and find an accessible copy of your work that they could read. Once you've set up a profile, you can choose automatic updates, so that you don't need to spend a lot of time updating your publications list, similar to how Orcid operates.

This is what a Google Scholar profile would look like. This one here is a screenshot of Dr. Adrian Owen's, who is a neuroscientist and prolific scholar here at Western. Some of you might even know of him.

On the left side of this profile, we have a list of Dr Owen's publications, along with the number of times that each was cited to the best of Google's knowledge, and it also includes the year of each publication.On the right hand side, on the bottom, we see a list of Dr Owen's co-authors who also have Google Scholar accounts, while on the top, we can see a summary and tabulation of Dr Owen's research impact based on citations.

We're seeing here that the total number of citations for Dr Owen's works that are collected by Google Scholar is over 54,000, and that he has an H index of 106, so that means that he has 106 works in Google Scholar that have been cited 106 times or more. And then this profile also shows an I-10 index. We're seeing here that Dr. Owen's I-10 number (or the number of publications that he has with at least 10 citations) is 274.

So this is what your profile would look like if you were to create a Google Scholar profile, of course with different publications and different citation counts. And there are very good reasons that you might want a Google Scholar profile and a record of the citation counts and citation impact that comes with it. First, it allows you to see not just how many people you're cited by, but also, who is citing you. Because if you click on the citation count numbers, you would actually be taken to a list of the works that have cited each of Dr Owen's works, which can be useful. You might also want others to be able to see your citation impact, like hiring committees, potential collaborators, promotion and tenure committees, funding agencies. And so, as my colleagues say, you definitely get your "bang for your buck" with Google Scholar profile and it can have a lot of benefits for you.

Now, the last thing that I want to talk about in this record of research section is sharing platforms: places where you can post copies of your published, or soon to be published works. What you're seeing here is a screenshot of Scholarship@Western. Scholarship@Western is our institutional repository, which openly disseminates all kinds of digital research that's being done by scholars here at Western. It's a trusted repository, and it meets Tri-agency grant funding mandates that require you to make research open access after publication.

Now I'm not going to get into much about open access today because we do have other workshops on this, but if you do have questions about it or it's something you want to learn more about, please do feel free to get in touch with us. We'll share an email address for my team at the end of this workshop.

For now, though, I'm going to say that you can upload copies of your published work to Scholarship@Western, as long as it's within the legal terms of copyright, and that would give your work more visibility. But what you can also do with Scholarship@Western is create an expert gallery that ties together all of the work in the repository to your profile in a visually appealing way. And that also includes some information about your biographic information or your research interests. Expert galleries in Scholarship@Western are our way to highlight the work of scholars on campus, and to also boost the reputation and profile of work that's happening in different departments and groups all across Western.

Now, when we bring up the topic of the institutional repository we often get the question, "What is the difference between a repository like Scholarship@Western, and other well known sites like Academia.edu, and ResearchGate?" So I'm sharing this chart to give a visual comparison of open access repositories like Scholarship@Western..this chart compares open access repositories to Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

In looking at this chart, we see a few things. First, while open access repositories like ScholarshipWWestern support export and harvesting, Academia.edu and ResearchGate don't. so they make it difficult, if not impossible, for others to get content out of these sites.

These sites also don't support long term preservation of works that are posted in them while open access repositories typically do. So it's hard to know exactly how long your research is going to be available in these repositories.

It's also important to note that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are commercial sites that sell ads and job posting services, and that hope to sell your data, which is a very different goal than open access repositories that have an explicit purpose of disseminating research as openly and widely as possible.

And then that ties into the last point on this chart. This chart was created by the University of California, which has an open access repository, or sorry, which has an open access policy. So that's not necessarily relevant for you, but there are a number of funding organizations like NSERC and CIHR that require that funded works be made openly available. Posting your work on Academia.edu and ResearchGate isn't going to meet these requirements, because those sites aren't actually as open as they seem to be. The works are only open to others who have an account with these sites, not to everyone on the internet.

So when it comes to scholarly ID, I would say that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are less effective than other tools we've covered at serving as a place to capture and make visible your record of research. I would say that they are better categorized as social networking sites, and that their purpose and features aligned with some of the themes and goals that will be talking about in our next section on social media and scholarly ID. So that's something to keep in mind as we move forward into the next section.

But, to summarize this section, I'm going to say that...closer to the beginning, I noted that there are a number of tools out there, and that you may not have the time and interest in building and maintaining a record of research in every single one. And you shouldn't have to. But if you're looking for a place to start, I want to help you prioritize. So, we rank Orcid as a must do for all of the reasons that we discussed earlier. We also highly recommend Google Scholar as a "bang for your buck" account, as I said. And then we'd say that creating an expert profile in Scholarship@Western, followed by a profile in Academia.edu and ResearchGate, are things that you can do if you'd like. But, you know, from our perspective, they're not a priority. And keep in mind, again, that ScholarshipWWestern has the benefit of providing a place to share your work openly, while Academia.edu and ResearchGate function more as social networking sites.

And these profiles, these profiles only take a few minutes to set up with some additional time spent adding works to your profile once it's created. And when we do these workshops in person we often dedicate some time to help attendees get set up with a profile. We would be doing that right now, but obviously can't do that today because it would be difficult to help each and every one of you. But what I can do is give you a link to a form, (I'll share it right now in the chat but also after the workshop), where-if you are interested in having us connect with you to support you in setting up an account in Orcid or Google Scholar and connecting your works--we would be happy to do that. Just let us know which one you're interested in, and share your email with us in that form and I will follow up and connect with you afterwards.

 So that is where I'm going to pause the discussion on record of research. The next thing will be talking about social media. So are there any questions right now about record of research before we do move into more of a discussion on social media? 

I see one person with their hand raised. If you would like to hop on the mic you're more than welcome.

[Participant]Hi. Can you hear me now?
[Emily] Yes. 
[Participant]Okay, thank you so much for the presentation. I have a question about Google Scholar. So sometimes, I'm in this stage of kind of working paper and I presented it in a conference and then it shows itself into Google Scholar. But, like, for example one year later when we just published, I have another version of the paper. And then the new version is also shown on the Google Scholar. So then the number of citations that I received - a bunch of them are under the older version and bunch of them are under this newer version. Is there any way to combine them with each other on the Google Scholar?
[Emily] Well, that's a good question. Courtney, do you have any sense of whether it's possible to combine them for Google Scholar?
[Courtney] I actually don't. I think that's a really good question for us to follow up on. As Emily also mentioned - you know, what's in Google Scholar, we're not really sure where they get all of their information. I mean they crawl a number of different, you know, places. So those citation counts sometimes are different from other sources and they, you know, I don't know how clear. It's not that they're inaccurate. But I don't know how easy it is to connect the dots between, you know, one version to another. So we can take that back and try and find an answer for you. It's a really good question. I actually don't actually know the answer to that question.
[Sarah] it is possible to merge records together in Google Scholar. I believe that you have to have an account setup. But there are some guides available, especially from other institutions. I don't know if we have one yet but there's guides available from Google Scholar directly, as well as from a couple other institutions, explaining how you can merge duplicate entries together into one, and get both of them put underneath your Google Scholar profile. 
[Participant] Okay, should I, should I be ready to myself, I mean, if I Google it can I find it?
[Sarah] We can we can follow up with that.
[Emily] Yeah, we can connect. We can connect with you via email and send you a link to some of that information. Thank you Sarah for adding that in there. Thank you.
[Participant] I really appreciate that thank you so much.
[Emily] No problem. That's a great question, and a learning opportunity for all of us. Are there any other questions from anyone before we move on to talking about social media? And as Sarah said in the chat if you have questions that you want to follow up with afterwards, our email is in the chat, as well, and you can email us there if you prefer.

[Emily]
Alright, I am going to move forward into the next section. So we're going to shift gears a little bit here and we're going to talk about the second element of a scholarly ID, which is a social media presence. I think that reasons for creating an online record of research are pretty straightforward and unified, but the reasons and goals behind social media use for scholarly identity are quite varied across academics. I was doing a literature review of this, and there are a lot of varying opinions and thoughts and advice, all of which is amplified by the fact that there are a lot of social media platforms out there, some of which are better for communicating academic value than others.

So rather than prescribing you with a list of to do's or talking about every single tool out there, I want to instead give you space to consider what your goals are, or might be, when it comes to social media using social media as a way of building your scholarly ID. 
Is it about finding a place to actively disseminate and promote your work in order to increase its impact and reach? Is it about finding and connecting with more collaborators? Is it about making yourself visible and branding yourself as a scholar? Or is it something else completely?

I'm going to get you...I'm going to ask that you reflect on that for a moment. And as you do I'll share what other scholars have said about their reasons for using social media for scholarly activity.

For example, in a study published in Nature a few years ago, researchers asked 3500 academics about their motivations for using Twitter.There were a number of reasons given, as you can see in this chart, but the most common ones were to follow discussions and discover peers, to post work content, and to share links to their own authored content. Also, to discover recommended papers and to comment on research. Less common reasons that were given for using Twitter included curiosity only, as a way of tracking their research metrics, and discovering jobs.

Now, this study surveyed academics who are all different points in their career, but recent publications have also confronted the reasons that being on social media may be especially beneficial to you as a grad student or as an early career researcher. A recent blog post by Ema Talam (who is a PhD student) and Jon Fairburn (who is an established researcher) outline the ways in which social media can be especially beneficial for PhD students, but their points are equally relevant for Masters students or early career researchers. They write that engaging with social media brings benefits for peer support and finding a wider community of academics who may be living through the same experiences as you and who are willing to help, and talk, and answer your questions. Social media can help you navigate your academic discipline, by giving you the chance to engage with and follow the projects and discourse that are happening in your discipline, but outside of your own institution. It can also be a way to find out about conferences and seminars or upcoming professional development opportunities in your discipline, because these are often shared on social media channels. Similarly, social media can be a way to keep up to date with the latest research and discourse, because not all research output lives strictly in peer reviewed papers and it's common that other research output formats like infographics and blog posts and videos are shared and discussed through social media. So to that end, social media can also be a way for you to communicate your research to wider audiences. And finally, job openings and new opportunities are also shared on social media so if you're able to curate your social network to follow people whose research or academic interests are more interesting to you, then you'll be able to see more relevant opportunities when they're posted.

So these are a number of reasons that, as a grad student or early career researcher in particular, social media might be helpful and relevant to you. I thought it was interesting to note that Talam and Fairburn also make the point that especially during
the pandemic, when opportunities to meet and network with people in your discipline at conferences or in-person events are limited, social media can fill that gap. Not in the same way but perhaps partially.

So now that I've shared some of what's been talked about in the literature and online with you, I want to know where your head's at or what your experiences look like when it comes to using social media platforms. I'm going to get you to just participate in a few small polls at menti.com. You can go to menti.com on any device that you have with you and type in the code 5846456. We can also share that in the chat, so that you can just copy and paste it.

I've shared the code and the website in the chat.

And I'm seeing that people are already sharing so what I'm going to do is actually share what the results are looking like so far. So the question is "what social media platform do you most use for academic use. And and I do have a "none" option there because that's also a perfectly valid option and I think reflects a lot of people's experiences as well.

So I'm seeing about half of the results have come in so far, with Twitter certainly taking the lead. And that was pretty consistent in the research that I looked at, too, on people's perceptions and use of social media for academics. LinkedIn is also pretty popular, which again is not entirely surprising.

I'll just give a few more moments for whoever else would like to participate in the poll to share  what they use on social media and which platform is their preference.

I'll say that we also offered this workshop a couple weeks ago and the results here are pretty, pretty similar, although I think in that group, a few people said ResearchGate or Academia.edu were their platform of preference.

Okay, I'll give it about five more seconds here and then I'll move on to the next question.

So the next question, and it should be open for you on your screen, is "what is your top motivation for engaging in social media for academic use?" We saw what the literature said for people at all stages in their academic career, and then we saw what recent discussions have said about social media in early career or in grad school. But what about this group?
(And again, there is that option to say "I don't use social media for academic reasons," which a few people said in the other poll.)

This is a really interesting spread actually. We're seeing some people saying "curiosity only." Some people saying "in case I'm contacted there," some saying "to follow discussions," "to contact peers and colleagues," "to discover recommended papers," "to discover peers and collaborators," and it's pretty even across these actually.

I'd say...so I am obviously working at Western libraries right now but for most of last year I was not working in a library, although I still wanted to get back into libraries. I definitely used Twitter a lot more during that time period than any other time period, so that I could feel like I was following discussions that were happening there and still staying up to date on the field, even though I was working outside of it.

Okay, so it looks like most people who want to participate have participated, so thank you. And there are a few reasons...actually, if I stop sharing my screen, I'll share my PowerPoint with you again.

So there are a few reasons that I wanted to ask these questions. The first is because social media use is so personal and it can vary by discipline and it can fluctuate over time, and so I wanted to be able to show that range and the variety in use. But I also asked that last question about your motivation for using social media because knowing your goals when it comes to building your scholarly ID can help you determine and prioritize if or which social media platforms you use and how you might want to engage, or need to engage, with them in order to achieve those goals. And I think this quote on this slide kind of gets at what I mean when I say that

This quote says: "If an increased reach is primarily what you seek, then you must be active in multiple communities related to your specialty. You already stay current on industry news and new research on your own, which is what others may be doing when they discover your research. However, if engagement and stimulated discussions are what you seek, then your active presence is required. Participating and driving discussions and posting content is what ultimately increases your visibility."

So that's just saying that, you know, depending on what your goal is with social media in a professional setting might dictate how you engage with it, in order to be able to achieve those goals, and how you engage with it can mean, how often you post, how often you spend on it. All of those kinds of things.

But regardless of your goal, my biggest suggestion for you is that is to find your community. Use the platforms that academics in your fields are using if you're going to be using social media and follow and reply to not just them but also the people that they're following and that are following them. You can also follow any relevant professional associations or academic journals, disciplinary sub-fields, relevant hashtags. Because regardless of your goal, doing this will connect you either to the people that you want to learn from or to the people that you want to promote your work to.

But in addition to acknowledging your own goals with social media use and how you might use it accordingly, I also want to acknowledge and make space to talk about the challenges or considerations that come with using it. In a recent study of risk associated with Emerging Scholars' use of social media, there was an overwhelming consensus among interviewees that they felt it was necessary to be on social media in order to be visible in their fields, but that pressure also came with a tension to manage their professional reputation in an online space that has so many different expectations and communities and audiences. And so some of the challenges related to professionalism that came to mind, or that they highlighted, were: social media use being subject to institutional policing, particularly from administrators or evaluators who might have a say in these in these people's futures. They also raised the issue of context collapse on social media, meaning that people don't necessarily...they didn't feel that people would always perceive their message or persona in the way that they intended. And then this led them to saying that it was labor intensive to maintain many accounts on different platforms, or to have a personal and a professional account. So they felt like they had to strike a balance between being professional and being too personal all within the same account.

And as an early career professional myself I think it's important to confront these tensions and challenges, so that we can be upfront about shared experiences, but also so that we can share potential solutions and strategies. And so I just want to spend a few minutes reflecting on that and sharing these challenges and strategies together.

I realize that sometimes it's easier to do so anonymously, so rather than having you share all of your thoughts in the chat (you can if you want) I posted two questions to this Google Doc, that I just dropped a link to in the chat. And I just want to spend some time in that document with you so that we can share together some of the challenges or concerns that you might be feeling with use of social media in an academic setting. But also, some of the practices that you follow or the strategies that you adopt in order to navigate these challenges and balance your time on social media. So if you open up the doc, I have already populated it with a few of the discussion points that came out of the discussion at the last workshop. Some of the points that were raised the last time we offered this were: social media being distracting and impacting productivity (I definitely felt that way in grad school). The need to constantly be adding and updating and engaging with social media was another thing that was raised, and having to navigate how personal you get in an online space knowing that others might come across that profile.
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I am going to finish up with a discussion of data and analytics on social media, or what's otherwise called altmetrics.

This is one thing that hasn't come up too much in our conversation about social media: The data and analytics piece that you can collect around your social media use. So, if you have Twitter, for example, (and I recognize from our poll that not everybody does but this is just an example) you can go to Twitter analytics and track the reach and impact of your tweets. So this slide shows that my former colleague, Lillian, tweeted 52 times in January of 2018, which resulted in almost 39,000 impressions. And it's possible to track those impressions for every month.

You could also connect your Twitter account to Tweepsmap, which is a site that shows where your followers are from and where the people who have mentioned you on Twitter are from. And so I draw your attention to these things, not to suggest that you all should be using Twitter, but more as an example of some of the data and analytics that you can get from social media sites to monitor and measure the impact of the things that you're sharing. This can be helpful for you to get a sense of where the academic connections that you're building are coming from and to see if you've achieved, kind of your, goal with social media use. That kind of thing.

But, social media data can be and is starting to be used more to also track research impact, so that's where we come to altmetrics. Altmetrics let us measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions. The term stands for alternative metrics, where the "alternative" part is in contrast to traditional measurements of academic success that we talked about earlier, like citation counts and author h index. So altmetrics then, are metrics beyond traditional citations, which are meant to complement, not totally replace, these traditional measures in order to give us a more complete picture of how research and scholarship is used. Altmetrics leverage the modern ability to be able to track interaction with online items, as a way of measuring research impact and reach. They can answer questions like: how many times was a paper downloaded? Was it covered by any news agencies? How many times was it shared on Facebook or Twitter? How many times was it commented on when it was shared? Which countries are looking at my research? All kinds of different questions that you can't necessarily get at with citation metrics.

So let me give you some examples of how all metrics are captured and made visible for individual items.

So this here - it's that blue circle with 12 in it - this is what we call the donut and altmetric attention score. It tells us that this article, in particular, was blogged about once and tweeted about seven times. It also has 16 readers on Mendeley. The donut can capture all kinds of non-traditional research impact, like sharing on Reddit or LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest. 

Altmetrics can also be captured and made visible with Plumx metrics, which is what Scholarship@Western uses. Plumx metrics captures mentions of an item in blog posts and news items, social media likes and shares, citations (including citations in research, but also in policy). It captures general usage like page visits and downloads, and it captures "Captures," which indicate that someone wants to come back and work on that item, because they favorited or bookmarked it.

So, altmetrics capture elements of societal impact and reach, and so they offer a more complete picture of the reach and impact of research and scholarship as a complement to traditional metrics. And they offer speed and discover ability when it comes to measuring research dissemination and research impact because a share or comment on social media happens a lot faster than a citation of your work in a peer reviewed article. And we've seen that the last point on this slide, the point about speed and discoverability, be especially true and relevant this past year when trying to measure the impact and quality of Covid-19 information.

With so many Covid-19 publications becoming available since early 2020, altmetrics have offered a way to rapidly assess an articles reach and dissemination after publication. Again, this is in complement to traditional metrics like citation count. Because those citation counts can take years to accumulate--because of how long it takes to do research and publish--in a rapidly evolving situation like we're in right now with the pandemic, relying solely on citation metrics is a less effective way to measure the reach and impact of research.

And so I have a reference to an article from last year on this slide, where Tornbery et al. compared the traditional metrics like citation counts to the metrics of 100 Covid-19 articles, to see if in fact all metrics could be used to evaluate trending Covid-19 articles. What they found was that the PlumX score, which I just mentioned on a previous slide, actually did correlate strongly with citation counts. This suggested that there is an alignment between the way that information is disseminated in scientific communities, and the way that it is disseminated among the general public in places like Facebook and Twitter. And so, what the researchers recommended based on their research was that altmetrics can be used to complement citation analysis for Covid-19 articles, especially when citation counts are not yet available to assess an articles quality.

Now, the researchers made this recommendation while also acknowledging that there are limitations to all metrics.

So some things to keep in mind are that these are just numbers without context, so we don't know if people are actually sharing the work for a positive reason, which can make it easy to game the system. Like, especially if your goal is to use social media to promote your work, then you can inflate your own altmetric numbers by sharing your work often and repeatedly. And then another point here is that even though altmetrics show a more complete view of the societal impact of research, they are slow in adoption when it comes to incorporating them as part of the tenure and promotion practices, and there are certainly disciplinary differences in how altmetrics are viewed as well.

But even with this in mind I raised the topic of data and altmetrics in this workshop because they are one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to social media and scholarly ID and getting a view of how your research is being shared in digital spaces, they can help you track and shape your scholarly ID.

But that is just a sneak preview and an introduction to the world of altmetrics. If this is something that you're interested in and want to know more about, my colleague Kristin Hoffmann will be offering a Research Impact workshop later this month, on Wednesday, April, 7, and we can share a link to register for this workshop in our follow up email. 

That is all that I have for today but I do see that there are two questions in the chat so far about all metrics. Courtney and Sarah, I'm not sure if you'd had time to look at them and were typing an email..or typing a response...but if so great.

Okay, so the first one says, "Can we only...can one only capture altmetrics through Twitter or several ways? So, yeah, looking at, I guess the way that altmetrics are tracked depends on the tool that's being used to track them. I gave the examples of the donuts and plumx, but you can see from these that it is definitely not just engagement on Twitter that is tracked. There is engagement on LinkedIn and Reddit and YouTube, Facebook. I mean all the things that are on this slide are what the donut score tracks. And then when it comes to Plumx, there are different things as well that are captured. 

[Courtney] Yeah and [redacted]'s question here about how does altmetrics work and do we need to have an account or something? So I just wanted to make a distinction between altmetrics as the concept of capturing alternative types of metrics and Almetrics is also a product, and sometimes those things can get confused but you don't have to have an account. Like our systems are integrated with both of these products. So like our catalog uses altmetric, and is connected, so anything that comes, you know any article that is in that system and we have a subscription to Plum metrics is similarly connected to our institutional repository. So they're more institutional types. I mean I think you can get individual subscriptions for something like this but we as an organization, use these tools. Does that make sense? Do you have additional information on that, Emily or is that... 

[Emily] No, I think I was just going to say like, systems are already tracking these things, so there's nothing that you really need to do but if your article is in a system that has these things integrated and is keeping track of altmetrics scores, then that's another place that you..I mean you could consult your article there and see how your article's being shared in these different ways. And that's just something to, to keep in mind as you're trying to track the impact of your work. It's a very good question though, and thanks Courtney for making the distinction.

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