Impact of Social Sciences – Who’s talking about your research? Tune in to the digital debate and discover what happens post-publication.

"How is your research being used? Who’s talking about it? Today researchers and their institutions, as well as donors, the media and even the general public are increasingly demanding answers to these questions. But as we all know, discovering what happens to your research after publication can be something of a challenge. It can be difficult even to get a sense of whether people are thinking about or discussing your research, let alone whether your work is having any big, real-world impact. Thanks to the Internet however, and especially to that sub-set of the internet known as social media, there’s a good chance that if people are talking about your research at all, some of those conversations are likely to be taking place online and in the public eye. And when this happens it usually leaves some kind of digital trace which can in principle be collected and analysed. Indeed because the very nature of social media it is theoretically possible not just to find isolated citations, but also conversation threads, where your ideas are being discussed and developed within a wider context, just as they might in a seminar or conference in the real world. They are effectively narratives; real-world stories about other people’s reactions to your research.  So how might we find and track these online conversations? Tuning in to the digital debate ... At IDS our approach has been to experiment with different combinations of software applications, including some high-end media monitoring systems such as Meltwater and Vocus, but also some of the many powerful low-price applications, such as Zapier ... The result of all this is a timeline, showing a chronological sequence of articles, tweets, Facebook posts, blogs or e-discussion posts, each of which refers, in some way, to the research you’re trying to track ..."