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The Spectrum of Scholarly Communication

Michael L. Nelson

WS-DL Luncheon

2019-11-07

@phonedude_mln

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Establishing a professional / research identity

  • In an attribution-based economy, your professional identity / reputation is the most important thing you have
  • Decide what your name is, and then stick with it!
    • Yes, you may have to map to Western & English-language assumptions about “First Name Middle Initial Last Name” as well as a representation in the ISO basic Latin alphabet
    • No, it’s not fair, but I don’t recommend fighting this battle

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Take this identity and

then engage with the community

  • The WS-DL wiki & Slack are internal; they’re necessary but out-of-scope for this discussion
  • You MUST have and use:
    • Twitter, SlideShare, GitHub, Google Scholar, ORCID (pronounced “orchid”, not “orc-id”), various public email lists
  • You SHOULD have and at least park on:
    • LinkedIn, ResearchGate, others

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Your professional identity can be integrated with or separate from your leisure / recreational identity

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There’s more to scholarly communication than just publishing papers

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The Spectrum of Scholarly Communication

(In roughly descending order of conventional importance)

Journals

Conference papers

Book chapters

Technical reports

Software / data

Slides

Blogs

Tweets

These get you hired / promoted

These are citable, but not peer reviewed

Lots of interest in making these citable / reviewed, but still not there yet

Not reviewed, typically not on your CV, citable in a pinch, but indexed and discoverable by search engines!

Receives WS-DL

publication points;

the extent of conventional identity

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Example: “Social Cards Probably Provide For Better Understanding Of Web Archive Collections”

Journals

Conference papers

Book chapters

Technical reports

Software / data

Slides

Blogs

Tweets (to the left)

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Scholarly communication establishes your reputation,

your reputation creates opportunities

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Google Scholar is not perfect,

but it’s probably the best tool we have right now

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How traffic arrives at my ODU Digital Commons

Google Scholar drives traffic, but we should add more of our references to wikipedia.

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ORCIDs are DOIs for people

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Tech reports / eprints:

Longer versions of published papers, ideas that are citable but not yet ready for conventional publication (priority claiming)

ACM CIKM 2019 eprint,

58 pages!

Describes a data set; cited in research publications but not suitable for a conference publication.

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arXiv: Put your work where people are already reading

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We open source software + data

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GitHub = RCS + blog + social media + file hosting + ...

Always fill out your bio!

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Slides won’t get you tenured, but they will be read

Remember assumptions about names baked into the system? SlideShare won’t let me have a middle initial.

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Blogs: more than tweets, not quite tech reports

Protocol / format, for public feedback

Trip Report

Trip Report

Trip Report

Related work review

PhD summary

Lessons learned with software packages

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The WS-DL blog gets a lot of traffic

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Choosing a good leading image when blogging means you’ll get a good social card

At time of tweeting, this post

lead with an embedded tweet

instead of an image

This post lead with an image, which Twitter et al. know how to extract and use

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Fill out your Twitter bio!

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Follow your peers + colleagues

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“For those who have passed, for those to come…”

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We’ve had an active research group for 16+ years

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Your identity is participating in a brand, the

Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

A sampling of unsolicited feedback...

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Mention @WebSciDL in your presentations

Repeat your handle in the footer. Most WebSciDL related conferences live tweet, and you don’t want to make people remember your handle.

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@WebSciDL exists to amplify your identity via RTs

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Writing a tweet:

Somewhere between a long title and a short abstract.

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Terse tweets #1

To be fair, this was in the 140 character limit days, and best practices had yet to emerge. Also note the URL in the 2010 tweet is no longer auto-linked!

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Good tweets #1

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Terse tweets #2

We have 280 characters now — use them!

Repeat the title, describe the key findings, use hashtags, mentions, etc.

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Good tweets #2

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Good tweets #3

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Good tweets #4

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Threads: Make each tweet a standalone “nugget”

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Got a long thread? Turn it into a blog post later.

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Quote Tweet: Adding context + commentary

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Engage with your peers

  • Tweeting, email lists, etc. — not something you do once a week or month. Check it every day.
  • Announcing updates to code, new findings, etc. — not something you do once and then you’re done.
    • If you do something cool, tell your peers.
  • It’s not just self-promotion — if you read good related work, learn something with a tool, issue a pull request, etc. — tell your peers.
    • Researchers love to talk about their work; informed, positive, and constructive feedback is always welcome.

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Announce, Engage, Link

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Be positive

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Participate in the full spectrum

Journals

Conference papers

Book chapters

Technical reports

Software / data

Slides

Blogs

Tweets

Your responsibility

doesn’t end here!

  1. Create a consistent professional identity
  2. Participate in the full spectrum of scholarly communication
  3. Support / RT your WS-DL team members
  4. Engage with peers with polite, informed, & constructive feedback