Everyone of us has some type of an account on social media. But which social media platform is the best for people who pursue/interested in science? One might assume that it would be ResearchGate. However, that does not seem to be where most of the action takes place. I deep-dived into the world of Twitter during my Masters and was pleasantly surprised by how active senior researchers were on it. If you are an undergrad, chances are that you spent hours writing an email to a scientist to find an internship position and then waited for weeks to get a response. Twitter presents an alternate universe where you receive a response to tweets in minutes. What I find most advantageous, are the tweets on Ph.D./PostDoc vacancies, lab migration/Setup and grant acceptances directly on Twitter. Finally, as an aspiring researcher, you must stay up-to-date with research developments in your field. On Twitter, if you follow researchers of your interest, it is highly likely that they tweet about their research papers and related updates to them. By following scientific journals, you can keep tabs on recent publications. Twitter also has tweet bots, which are twitter profiles that automatically retweet papers of a particular research area. Over the years, I have hugely benefitted from my presence on Twitter. Therefore, I decided to have a series of posts in the NGSF Blog, through which I will try to bring attention to interesting twitter threads that will be useful for people aspiring careers in scientific research.
If you don’t have a twitter profile already,
- Start a twitter profile (https://twitter.com)
- Follow scientists of your interest (Ex: @JoeEcker, @thattai)
- Follow journals of your interest (Ex: @nature, @CellCellPress)
- Follow research organizations of your interest (Ex: @Harvard, @HelmholtzMunich)
- Follow Tweetbots in your research area (Ex: @TF_binding_bot, @synbio_papers)
- Follow NGSF 🙂 @GenScientists
