Your academic success depends on academic communication skills. Learn about how you can skyrocet reach of your research by leveraging journals and social media!

Let’s agree on one thing. As with any other type of career, your academic success will depend on your academic communication skills.

This is because academic communication is the key skill that each researcher and academic must master in order to discuss and share their research with the wider community. So that is why, in this article, I wanted to discuss how you can use traditional and new outlets to share your research.

Here I’m going to answer the following questions:

• What are the possible research outlets?
• How you can disseminate your research?
• What is the comparison between conventional research papers and social media?
• What’s the value of both?
• What are the benefits of both and is any one of those better or not? Do we need both?
• How yo can use social media to achieve an even bigger impact with your research?

And this is all based on the experience that I’ve been building over the past couple of years. I trust this will give you some insight on how to improve your academic communication skills and advance your academic career!

If you’d prefer to watch the recording of my recent live session on academic communication skills, you can find it below! Enjoy!

What is academic communication? 

You may wonder what is academic communication and why you need to master it? I think this is pretty important that you develop and master creating different academic communications, or different content types, during your postdoc and throughout your academic career. Because mostly we doing our research to help others, right? So we did research, we are generating new knowledge and that new knowledge needs to be disseminated to the wider audience in order to achieve impact. 

And this is what communication for academic purposes is – a process of sharing your knowledge with an audience that will find it useful. That is why it is crucial to know how to improve academic communication skills. 

How to share your research – on research outlets

How do you share your research? It’ is a very interesting question to me because I’ve started reflecting on that couple of years ago, mostly because, well, I do believe there is more than just pure research papers, right?

The ultimate goal for us is to publish a research paper or disseminate our research in the form of a research paper because that’s something like a quality stamp, right? If you publish in a prestigious journal, it went through the peer review process. If it’s accepted for publication, it means that other people actually reviewed your work and they say that your research is valid, your claims are correct, your methodology is sound, and that’s why you get this quality stamp.

Of course, peer review is imperfect. Let’s agree on that. But to some extent, peer review process can improve the quality of your research. But, what are the other options that you have to disseminate your research? So I put this slide together so that you know where to share your work.

We, of course, have academic papers, and I’ve already mentioned that. But there’s a much wider audience that is interested in your research. People who are interested in your work usually include policymakers, industry professionals, professionals in your research area, other researchers and students. Therefore, another way to communicate your research may be via briefing documents. You can develop these based on your academic papers.

Briefing documents tend to be more specific and focused on the application and implications of your research to the real world. OK, so briefing documents are meant to briefly describe your research and just focus on the outputs.

One of many alternative academic communication examples is an article in a trade magazine. I started doing trade articles some time ago, found it really encouraging in order in terms of the feedback that I received from professionals in my research area. I do publish some of the trade articles related to energy and process engineering, mostly because of my background. But there are so many trade journals to select from, and I’m sure you can find one for your research area.

What is a trade article? Such an article is basically a publication in a magazine that is read by professionals in your field. Therefore, in many cases, it is widely available. It is focused on the, for example, the engineering part of what you do and, again, on the application. So it’s a very practical type of article that you can publish. You can actually use your research paper as a basis for the development of such a paper and reflect on how the outcomes of your research paper inform decisions made by the decision-makers in your area. And based on that, you can write a great article.

Case studies are, in my view, a slightly underutilized way of sharing research in my field. These are basically a description of a specific case and application of your research. So for example, in my work, I work on carbon capture and storage. I could do a case study on the retrofit of carbon capture, specific carbon capture plant to a pulp and paper industry, for example. In my case study, I’d describe how that case would work. I would also describe the implications of performance, economics, lifecycle assessment and so on. Therefore, the aim of a case study is to represent that specific set of outputs. 

Datasets are becoming increasingly more and more important as we’re transitioning to open science. It means that you can share your datasets including the primary or secondary data that you collected during your research. You might want to share it with others so that they can analyze or build on your data. This could actually help you achieve a bigger impact with your research.

And then last but not least, we can represent our work in the form of creative content. So creative content is anything that you put on social media videos, photos, presentations, webinars, live sessions and so on. Literally, anything that you put on social media can be considered to be creative content.

The key question that you need to answer is who will find your work useful? Who do you think will find your work useful? And if you think about who you can serve with your research, you can realize that there are some ways that are better to actually connect with them and share your research directly with them.

For example, policymakers may not read academic papers. They may read briefing documents because they don’t have time to go all through all of the methodology, introduction and other sections of your paper. They just want concrete answers that can info their decision.

Another example can be graduate students who will go through the academic papers but may not know about your research paper. To make them aware of your work, you may just share some posts about it on social media. Basically, think about who your audience is, who will benefit from your paper or from your research, and how you can contact them.

This is how you can drive the dissemination strategy for your research. If you need support with deriving an academic communication strategy for your work, I am happy to help!

Is it important to publish in journals if I can share my research on social media?

Consider this. On the one hand, you have a very well established, traditional way of communicating your research via academic journals. And then you’ve got the creative content to share on social media.

Some people think that putting stuff on social media is low quality or even unprofessional. After all, it doesn’t go through peer review, so it doesn’t add value and doesn’t create impact. But I believe that both can definitely work together. Right? Publication in research journals gives you the quality stamp, while creative content gives you visibility and helps you to build expert track record. And then, as a result, your journals will be discovered by more people – you can see the correlation there.

So let me describe the benefits of both and how you can use them together for communication in academic purposes. 

Why publish in academic journals?

Why do you publish in journals? There are lots of reasons why do you want to become a published author.

Of course, scientific journals are considered the gold standard for scientific output. It’s been peer reviewed by the experts in your field. It means that you get feedback on your papers and if there are any significant omissions, or if your research is not sound, it will not be published by that journal. But if your work makes sense, if people agree with it, then it will be published – of course usually with some degree of corrections made as recommended by reviewers and editors. And that’s why you get feedback from the experts in your field.

The benefit of publishing in journals is the fact that you already publish to an outlet with a community interested in your subject. Remember, each journal brings a community around its scope. As a result, once the new papers are published, many people will read them while picking up the new journal issue. So as a result, you can share your research directly with people who are interested in your research.

I think another benefit of publishing in journals is that your name is associated with the results. Consequently, you become recognized for that specific contribution and novelty. This helps you with your career progression and discoverability of your work, because journals are usually very well optimized for web search.

It means your research will be you can be found in the World of Science, Scopus, PubMed and any older databases where the papers are stored. This is the benefit of publishing in journals in itself too – other people can re-use your research and link back to your work by citing it. They can build on your work and that wouldn’t be possible if you just publish a fraction of your research on your social media.

Basically, journals give you space where you can explain in detail what you did, how you did it and what are the implications of your discoveries.

Another aspect that makes me publish papers is the fact that if I make my paper open access, then everyone can openly access my work and data. Why do we share data behind our figures and tables, and sometimes even our models? We do it so that the community around our in our research area can use data that we produced and they can use it in their work. Right? The fact that we share something may save them time developing the same model or set of data. So that’s all about, you know, sharing and working together.

Why publish creative content on social media?

Why would you want to publish creative content on social media? Well, the main benefit of this kind of academic communication is the fact that you can make your work immediately open access. It means that you don’t have to wait for the peer review process, which can take about between two and twelve months sometimes. Of course, it is a quality control process, but consequently, it takes time. 

The time between you generating the results and getting your results out there so that other people can learn about your outcome can in many cases be up to a year or even more sometimes. So if you discover something new now, many people will only learn about it in a couple of years. No really great representation of academic communication and knowledge transfer right? 

This is the issue with academic publishing. Social media can mitigate this to some extent as you can immediately publish elements of your work with a relevant audience. You can also reach a more diverse audience. So if you published in journals most likely subscription journals, then your research might be behind the paywall. If you haven’t made your paper open access, many people will not have access to your work.

For example, industrial professionals and policymakers may not be aware of the research going on in their area of expertise, mostly because they don’t have access to journals. So making sure that your research is as widely available as possible can help you reach more diverse audiences and share the knowledge you created more broadly.

You might again leverage existing communities. Some social media platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, include subject-specific groups that gather other people interested in the same subject.

For example, there is a group of carbon capture that I’m a member of, and we often discuss some of the recent developments on carbon capture over there.

You can also engage with your audience on social media, directly engaging in discussion with people interested in your work. Such engagement can provide you with a direct from the audience and you can clarify, explain or maybe just add some more value.

Another benefit of using social media is the fact that we can build relationships and collaborations. I’ve been doing this a lot on LinkedIn for the past couple of months right now. Basically, whenever I put some of my stuff on LinkedIn, there are always new ideas coming up for further research. So that’s the ultimate value of, you know, sharing your content.

And it doesn’t mean to be complicated, right? You don’t need to spend hours on a day doing that. It is five to ten minutes. Usually, we want to post some quality content out of your research. And at the end of the day, you know your thought-leadership posts, articles and videos will build your expert profile. People will recognize that you are the expert in this specific area. This is something that you’ve provided them with the evidence in the forms of the case study, data, project descriptions, webinars and so on. Consequently, you can become a “go-to” expert in your specific field of study. This would further elevate your research impact, your profile and your career.

Academic journals vs social media. Which can achieve more impact? Examples of academic communication

Right, so we know what the benefits of publishing in academic journals and social media are – so which one can achieve help you achieve more impact? This is the ultimate question that we are asking ourselves as academics. Do you just publish in journals? Do you just share your work as creative content? Do you do both?

And, I think sharing the answer to this at the very beginning. But let me show you a little bit of comparison before I tell you what I do in my research. I selected two papers that I published within the past three years.

Example of academic communication #1

So one is a fairly recent paper published last year in Applied Thermal Engineering, which was based on the research of my former PhD student. You can see that Mendeley tells me that there were only 10 readers of that paper and no citations so far.

But I shared the same paper in the form of a document on LinkedIn. Of course, I shared the author accepted a copy so that there was no copyright issue. This post was viewed more than 10 thousand times. Although the number of views tends to be a vanity metric, it is 3 orders of magnitude higher than that reported by Mendeley. It also received quite a lot of likes and comments.

Do you see the value of sharing your work on social media? Let’s look at another example.

Example of academic communication #2

Let’s look at another paper I published about 4 years ago on combined heat and power generation with direct air capture. According to Mendeley, it had about 80 reads and got about 20 citations.  

But then I had published it on LinkedIn as a document. Again, this paper is open access so I could share a full version. It hit about 42,000 views over the past couple of months and gathered a lot of engagement. This engagement led to one or two quite good discussions out of social media later on and potential collaborations.

So you can see that, of course, publishing in open access journals will influence how many people actually read your work and how many people have access to it. Be aware of predatory journals tough! But sharing your work further with your community through social media will definitely have an impact on the discoverability of your work.

And I know some people say the paper is published already and it’s the journal’s responsibility to promote it and that people aren’t social media experts and don’t want to bother with it. But I guess that is our role as academics to actually share our research as widely as possible, and thus we need to catch up with the new trends – social media gives us the opportunity to reach even more people with our work. But I guess if you want to share your research more widely with relevant people, then you will definitely use social media.

So in conclusion I believe that both are important, but creative content can help you reach more people. This means that, on the one hand, you do have to publish your work in the academic journals so that you basically get that quality stamp and you make sure that your research is valid and that you’ve got a claim to that specific novelty.

But, on the other hand, sharing your work with your networks will help you achieve more impact. Such activity will lead to more engagement with your work. It will lead to more application of your work.  It doesn’t really matter whether such activities will increase your citation count. What truly matters is how people will use your research and whether it can contribute to making our world a better place for all. This is the main message I want to leave you with.

In summary, I believe that both academic publications and creative content are important. Publications in academic journals give you the quality stamp, whereas social media can extend the reach of your research and help you build your expert track record, leading to academic success.

Examples of academic communication via creative content on social media

What to share on social media? I’ve already mentioned some options briefly, but I know that this is something that I get asked a lot by people I mentor.

To leverage your academic writing, LinkedIn and Facebook (and other platforms too) give you lots of opportunities to share your work. The most important thing is, however, that you find what you enjoy the most.  If you aren’t comfortable with making videos or recording audio podcasts, then you don’t have to do it.

There are other ways to share your research. For example, you can create graphs, slides, or even webinars. You can create posts that briefly explain the implications of your work. You can share the journey that you went through to generate your results. 

You might try to go out of your comfort zone from time to time just to see how that works. And for example, two years ago, I had a discussion with Magda about doing live videos. At that time, I said, I’d never do live videos. But two years forward, I do them on a weekly basis!

Try to go out of your comfort zone sometimes, and you would be surprised how enjoyable that could be.

Conclusion

I hope that I convinced you that using social media can elevate the impact of your research. And even though this may not be the main part of your academic activities, I believe that we can extend the impact of your research by considering different output outlets, including trade magazines, briefing documents, case studies, and creative content.

If you would like to learn more about how you can develop your social media profiles, let me know. Happy to mentor you.

If you like my work, you can support it on coffee so you can buy me a coffee.

I would really appreciate this past his help me generate better content! If you’ve got any idea on the topics that I should cover, do let me know 

The final message that I want to leave you with is that improving your academic communication skills sharing your research is important because you don’t want to spend years working on something that no one will read. That’s why we do have to find a way to actually get to people who will be interested in what we do. I believe that there will be lots of people interested in what you do.

If you read this article to this point, please do share your research below. Also, share your tips to improve academic communication skills with us!