Poll: Most Preferred Means for Promoting Academic Work
A reader requested a poll to help him determine how to promote and share his work online and make contact with other academics with similar interests. Let’s do it! Which of the following would you recommend? I know one popular answer might be “all of them,” but that’s not an option. You can select two, though.
Thanks!
(Not as fun as The Most Important Philosophy Poll Poll, I know. But possibly more useful!)
I’m Facebook friends with few of the academics doing similar work, so I always post there
Surprised both Twitter and SSRN (Social Science Research Network) not options…
In retrospect, I ought to have included Facebook, Twitter, and SSRN, just for completeness. However, in my experience, not many philosophers make much use of SSRN (unless they work in political theory or other subfields close to the social sciences). As for Twitter, it is such a deluge of information for the reader that, unless one has a lot of followers, I would guess that it is unlikely to be a very effective way to promote one’s work. Thom, have you ever seen a Tweet from someone not already famous about a philosophy paper they wrote get more than a few likes and a few retweets? (Is there data on this?) Facebook status updates may help (though some people object to this practice — see http://dailynous.com/2015/04/13/norms-of-self-promotion/) but perhaps Facebook groups would be a good tool.
And, ironically, I left out blogging.
I use Twitter more than about anything else – and most of the people I follow are not famous philosophers (or political scientists or legal academics). But maybe that’s not the norm for most people.
I think that there may be differences in the use of Academia vs ResearchGate as a function of your academic discipline. In my experience, scientists are more likely to use ResearchGate while philosophers and other academics in the humanities tend to prefer Academia.com.
As you mention above Justin, blogging. As an isolated philosopher in a department scattered across the state the old blog The Garden of Forking Paths and it’s excellent successor Flickers of Freedom rejuvenated my career-long interests in metaphysics and action theory. I owe much to them.
Grumble. That’s an autocorrected “it’s”. Jeez.
In philosophy of science, philsci-archive.pitt.edu is pretty much the universal route.
“The referee reports I write when I’ve rejected a paper” – Referee #2