Learning outcomes
- Understanding the importance of building connections and collaborating for a successful career
- Awareness of your current digital footprint, and how your online presence can help you to build research connections and collaborations
- Know which online tools are appropriate for your purposes e.g. discipline, career stage, project goals
- Confidence in using online tools to build effective research networks
Understand the game
Be strategic, and selective
Identify collaborators
(partners for research, funding or future projects)
- SCU colleagues – search in Southern Cross Researcher Profiles
- Colleagues you meet at conferences, including cross-discipline collaborators
- Opportunities for learning new skills and perspectives, build your expertise
- Government departments
- Business and industry, e.g. NGOs, registered charities, cultural institutions
- Practitioners and community, e.g. health, education
- Maintain your online profiles (in-person collaborators will still search for you online)
- Use appropriate tools for your discipline, career stage and goals
- Don’t say yes to every opportunity – some will be of more benefit or more relevant than others, so choose wisely to make the most of your time
- Can be a great way to create engagement and raise awareness about your research
- Here’s an example: Balloon Debris Survey: A Citizen Science Study
Build your network
Where to connect
Where are others in your research area?
You don’t need accounts everywhere, consider where your colleagues are e.g.:
Do not post copyright material to any platform, use social media effectively and responsibly:
SCU media policy
Become a member
- SCU’s Postgraduate Student Association
- Discipline specific associations (contact your supervisor for recommendations)
Attend events
- Attend conferences and workshops specific to your research area
- SCU Facebook or your school’s email lists will advertise events
- Events on SCU Library website
Promote your research
Promoting your research
Open Access publishing
- Publish open access to facilitate sharing
Repositories to share your research
Reach beyond academia
How does your research contribute to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research?
- Prepare a press release – Contact SCU Media and Communications
- The Conversation: Australia’s largest independent news source (see SCU authored articles)
- Write for trade publications specific to your research area
- Add your research findings to relevant Wikipedia articles
- Share slides or videos e.g.Slideshare, Vimeo
- Create podcasts or interviews e.g. Soundcloud
- Write a blog or blogpost – see advice on The Research Whisperer
Data visualisation
- Check Visualise Your Thesis for ideas
Further reading
- The Conversation’s blog – read about the benefits of publishing an article in The Conversation, including reports from authors who describe how their article made a difference
- Five Tips about Effective Networking for Researchers
- Ten rules for successful research collaboration by Robyn Keast and Michael Charles, Southern Cross University, article from The Conversation
- Reading List: Using Social Media for Research Collaboration and Public Engagement
- Citizen science: how you can contribute to coronavirus research without leaving the house
Activity
- Google yourself to see what others would learn about you.
- Select a researcher that you would like to work with one day and Google them. Search for them in the Southern Cross Research Portal, The Conversation, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, other sites where you think they might be listed as an author.
- Search for a government department, business, industry or community group that could benefit from your research. What could you do to help them find out about your research?
Getting published