This document summarizes a presentation given by PhD student Yimei Zhu on her research into how PhD students use blogs, Twitter, and Facebook for scholarly communication. She conducted interviews and participant observation of 7 PhD students to understand their use of social media and strategies employed. Key findings included blogs, Twitter, and Facebook being helpful for networking and dissemination but concerns around lack of academic rewards and privacy. Future work will include a survey and more interviews.

1. 2012 China New Media Communication Association Annual Conference
Macao International Conference
6-8 December 2012
 Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD
Students for Scholarly Communication:
a UK study
 Yimei Zhu
Sociology PhD Student
 University of Manchester
 Twitter: @yimeizhu
 http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com
 Supervisor: Prof. Rob Procter

2. Introduction of my PhD project
 My PhD thesis:
 Are the new forms of scholarly communication the
pathway to open science?
 Open access to publication
 Open access to research data
 Using social media for scholarly communication
 This PhD project is funded by Manchester eResearch Centre under
the supervision of Professor Rob Procter.
 This paper I’m presenting today is focused on using social media for
scholarly communication based on a pilot study I’ve conducted with
PhD students.

3. Scholarly communication
 Scholarly communication, has been used as a
broad term to cover all the activities and norms of
academic research related to producing,
exchanging and disseminating knowledge (Rieger
2010; Hahn et al 2011).
 Social media tools has enabled a real-time
communication and dissemination of scholarly
contents (Procter et al 2010).

4. What’s there for PhD students?
 Some Questions to consider:
 For PhD students and early career researchers, it’s important to get
your work done and publish in a reputable journal, as they have not
secured professional status. Would the use of social media waste their
time of doing ‘real’ research?
 The Research Excellence Framework (REF), which are guidelines
released by the Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE), have not yet given credit to contents on the social media.
 Can the adoption of new media tools benefit PhD students’ work and
future career?
 What strategies can be employed to maximise the impact of using social
media?

5. Research Methods
 Qualitative interviews :
 Participant observation
 Case study of #PhDchat

6. Pilot interviews (June-Sep 2012)
 Interviews:
 By face-to-face, Skype and Emails
 7 PhD students from various disciplines
 3 face-to-face interviews
 1 Skype interviews
 3 email interviews

7. Interviewees
 Users:
 Male, PhD student in Education
 Male, PhD student in Life Science
 Female, PhD student in Education
 Female, PhD student in Biology
 Female, PhD student in Sociology

 Non-users:
 Male, PhD student in Politics
 Female, PhD student in Material Engineering

8. Participant observation
 Talked to various researchers about their attitudes
towards and experience of using social media in
various social occasions
 Created my own twitter account, Facebook page
and academic blog, as well as playing around with
a number of social media tools
 I started using Twitter, Facebook page and blog for
research related purpose

9. Case studies of #phdchat
 #phdchat was first set up in 2010 by a UK based PhD
student and became a regular chat event on Twitter
every Wednesday 7.30-8.30pm at British Standard
Time
 I joined in the conversation of Twitter #phdchat a
few times and often used the hashtag in my tweets.
 I analysed archive data of Tweets that includes
#PhDchat from a topic called 'Blogging about your
Research’ of 4 April and 20 June 2012.

10. Results and Discussion
 According to the participants in this study, current
most commonly used social media tools to promote
research:
 Blogs, Twitter, Facebook groups and pages

11.  Also used:
 Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Mendeley,
YouTube, Tumblr, Scoop.it and Pearltree, etc.

12. Blogs
 Sites: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr or blogs hosted
by their institutions
 Content and Function of research blog:
 Promote published papers or abstracts for
conferences
 Used as a notebook to record thoughts & progress
 Practise writing and reflecting
 Disseminate and gather information
 Networking & Getting feedback

13. Twitter
 Disseminate information to a wide audience
 ‘I use Twitter to disseminate information, present things from other
network. Twitter is like a platform, connected to many other social
media and websites. Twitter presents short summary.’ (Male, PhD
student in Life Science)
 Find information quickly
 Used at conferences or before attending conferences

14. Facebook Group and Page
 Facilitate an informal support network for
researchers
 Post information about conferences, workshops and
work opportunities
 Seek advices
 Organise events

15. Difficulties and Potential problems
 Fear of not being able to secure academic rewards, thus
being very protective of their data
 Worry of ideas being pinched or plagiarism
 Content on social media being misused for inappropriate
purposes
 Lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain social
media presence
 Revealing too much personal information

16. Strategies used by participants
 Link different social media sites for cross-platform
promotion.
 ‘‘Linking each site to one another so that they’re updated
automatically… I set up WordPress link to my Twitter which is linked
to my Facebook page…So I cover both bases separately.”
(Female, PhD student in Education)

17. Create a personal learning network (PLN):
 ‘A personal learning network (pln), can be defined as a
collection of people and resources that guide your
learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your
questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge
and experience.’ (Nielsen 2008)
 Getting support from peers all across the globe

18. Build a professional online profile
 ‘Privacy issue: Have different identities on
Twitter and Facebook
 Having a Facebook page that fans can ‘like’ is a
strategy of having a Facebook presence but using it
for a professional purpose.
 Interviewees all agree that they would not leak
research findings on social media before going
through traditional publication channel first.

19. Conclusion
 New media tools, such as academic blogs, Twitter
and Facebook, can be very helpful for PhD students
and early career researchers to raise their profiles to
an international audience.
 There are difficulties and potential problems such
as the lack of standards and incentives.
 Respondents from this study use various strategies
to maximise the impact of their scholarly
communication practice.

20. Future Work
 An internet survey with UK academic researchers to
obtain a representative sample
 More follow-up-interviews and participant
observation after the survey

21. Reference
 Hahn, T., Burright, M. & Duggan, H. (2011). Has the revolution in scholarly communication lived
up to its promise? American Society for Information Science and Technology, 37(5), 5.
 HEFCE. (2012). Publication [Online]. Available: http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/ [Accessed 13 July
2012].
 Nielsen, L. 2008. Developing Mentors from Your Personal Learning Network. The Innovative
Educator [Online]. Available from:
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/developing-mentors-from-your-
personal.html [Accessed 5 Sep 2012].
 Procter, R., Williams, R., Stewart, J., Poschen, M., Snee, H., Voss, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M. (2010).
Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A, 368(1926).
 Rieger, O. Y. (2010). Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship.
First Monday, 15(10).

22. Thank you!
 If you are interested in my study, you can
see my blog:
http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com to see
conference presentation slides
 ‘Shall we use social media for our research?’
 Follow me on Twitter @yimeizhu
 Facebook Page:
www.facebook.com/yimeizhumanchester