Social media: A guide for researchers (Elena Golovuskina case study)

Elena Golovuskina

I am currently a PhD candidate at Glasgow Caledonian University. The topic of my PhD is developing employability skills of doctoral researchers. I completed my BSc in Linguistics in my home country Russia then completed my MSc and I have just completed my first year of my PhD.

I prefer to discover information about my work by using social media, discussing with my colleagues and online resources. It depends on my needs and what I want to find out but I usually get a lot of information through Twitter.

I prefer to use blogging, microblogging like Twitter, social bookmarking, social citation like Zotero, writing tools, social/ professional networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn and aggregators and dashboards like Netvibes. I think that all of them are integral in my everyday and professional life but for different reasons.

I first started using social media tools because my supervisor encouraged me to do it because it would be really useful for my research. I actually believe that social media have helped me becoming a better researcher because I learnt to organise myself in a better way, disseminate it more and connect with other researchers.

Social media have impacted on my personal life in a very bad way. It just takes a lot of time and you get addicted to it so I find myself now spending more time on Twitter, LinkedIn etc instead of doing more research or spending time with people in real life.

In general, I think social media is a good thing, if you balance it all up. It’s a great resource for researchers in terms of public engagement, getting new contacts and employability. It is also very important to establish a digital profile nowadays so that people can find out easily about you and your research.

Elena Golovuskina’s blog: My exciting PhD journey! http://elenaphd.wordpress.com

The main project page for Social media: A guide for researchers is here.