The use of social networks in research

Social networks play a crucial role in research, particularly in the dissemination of knowledge and findings and in the creation of networks with fellow researchers.

These platforms provide researchers with a dynamic space to connect, collaborate, and share their work with an audience spreaded over the globe. By mastering the use of social media, researchers can effortlessly reach and engage with a diverse community of scholars, practitioners, and interested individuals, transcending geographical and institutional boundaries. The speed and ease of disseminating research through social networks enable the rapid exchange of ideas, conversations and enhance the chances of innovation.

Moreover, social networks offer a democratic platform which promote open access to information, ensuring that research findings are accessible to a wider audience, including policymakers, educators, and the general public.

Some of the social networks that can be used for researchers are:

• LinkedIn - It is the best known professional platform. It is great for creating a community with other professionals and for receiving the latest news of your topics of interest.
• Research gate - On it, researchers can upload their works, democratising the access to knowledge without the interference of big publishing houses. Besides, it has the option of asking authors if they can send you things that are not fully accessible online, favouring cooperation and network-building.
• Twitter - This social media platform allows your research results to reach a wider audience in small pills of knowledge. It can also be useful for promoting events and congresses through the use of hashtags.
• Academia.edu - This social platform can help you to discover and connect with other academics all over the globe.

Personally, i think that promoting your work on social media is relevant for dissemination purposes, but should not be the core of your research activity, as it is really time consuming. Besides, in my opinion not separating profesional and personal media accounts can end up backfiring and diverting your networks as people on their personal social media profiles are biased and polarised, while research, if intending to reach a wider audience and to create an impact, might need to be as neutral and objective as possible.

  

In the following screenshot all the different tools we have seen throughout this course are organised in Symbaloo (also accessible from here), and a few more have been added as I intend to use this platform for my daily research tasks. In the upper left corner there are some tools for curating content and information as Diigo, Feedly and Scoop.it. In the upper right conrenr there are some accesses to the different patforms introduced for create an online researcher profile (Google Scholar, about-me, ORCID and UBU- portal de la investigación) as well as social networks like LinkedIn, Acedmia.edu and Research Gate. In the bottom of the image other tools for research have also been included. In the left there are some research engines for academic literature, in the right some AI that may be helpful for researching and in the middle, there are some softwares for document-sharing, specifically Microsoft and Google ones.

This course has been very useful for learning about softwares which I wasn't familiar with, as all the content curating ones as well as symbaloo. I'm sure I will take advantage of them as they are all very interesting for improving productivity when researching. 

The methodology of the course has also been well-organised, as I feel that this practical approach is much more convenient when working with electronic resources. It has allow us to work for ourselves while creating a pool of resources that we will surely make use of in the future.