Hello, and thank you for listening to the MicroBinFeed podcast. Here, we will be
discussing topics in microbial bioinformatics. We hope that we can give you some
insights, tips, and tricks along the way. There is so much information we all
know from working in the field, but nobody writes it down. There is no manual,
and it's assumed you'll pick it up. We hope to fill in a few of these gaps. My
co-hosts are Dr. Nabil Ali Khan and Dr. Andrew Page. I am Dr. Lee Katz. Both
Andrew and Nabil work in the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, where they work
on microbes in food and the impact on human health. I work at Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and am an adjunct member at the University of
Georgia in the U.S. Hello and welcome to the Microbial Bioinformatics podcast.
Andrew, Lee, and myself are your co-hosts for today, and we're talking about
something a little different. We're talking about how to develop an online
presence to promote your science. Now often we think that this is something as
simple as presenting one or two papers a year, and maybe presenting at a
conference, and job's done, but there's a little bit more to it than that. On
the other hand, if you talk to a lot of people who do marketing online, they
have a very different view about the amount of effort you need to put in, so
we're here specifically to talk about how to develop online presence as it
applies to microbial researchers and bioinformaticians. We're all super busy, so
what we want to talk about here today is really some simple changes you can make
that will work passively with some big returns for you. So yeah, how to make an
online presence, how can it help you, what works, what doesn't work. So let's
start off with Lee and Andrew. I want to talk about what do you feel is
different between when people talk about online digital marketing stuff, online
presence, between say commercial space and academia? Well one thing I've noticed
is commercial, they'll try and sell you stuff like there's no tomorrow. You get
these sales guys emailing all the time, you get adverts in your face, you get
constant bombardment, but you don't get that with research. It's very much
passive, and it's like someone will spend years working on a paper and then
silently drop it into the ether. And it may appear on PubMed, it might be in a
good journal, but they do nothing to actually tell anyone that here I've got
this great work, I've found this great thing, off you go. And they don't put out
the major points, they don't say this is why it's great. I don't want to read
like a 20 or 50 page paper to find out this amazing results buried on page 39. I
want it upfront and I want to know it quickly and in nice, easy to consume
format. So that's where we don't do very well in academia. We don't really sell
our science, sell the work that we've done to other research and to other
scientists. And we need to do a much better job at that. I would say in
government also, you are part of the collective for better or worse. And I think
everyone works really well as a team and you promote something, but it goes up
on the CDC website. No one personally gets attributed, it's CDC saying this,
right? So if you do like a lot of work towards something, then you're still kind
of obscured and nobody knows that you did it, you're a faceless bureaucrat. So
how do you locate a researcher? So it's different to how you would say, find a
reputable carpenter or something, or look up someone or look up for a good
restaurant or something like that, the way you do that process. How do you find
a researcher? You're at a conference, you see a talk that you kind of like, or a
poster you like, you want to find out more, but you're hiring, someone says this
guy or gal does great work. What's your process? The premise is already that
you're already involved in the community, right? So the first step is going to
conferences or starting to read the literature, the thing that you like, and you
find some kind of hook in there. And then if you do like somebody, then yeah,
how do you look them up? I like that question a lot. I guess I usually start
with Google Scholar. I don't know. What about you, Andrew? That might be my
first port to call, not a charter named Google, not even Google Scholar.
Hopefully they have a Google Scholar profile, which soon people don't, which is
shocking really. But if you're talking to a librarian, they'll give you a
different answer. They'll say, oh, well, you looked them up on Scopus or PubMed,
you do this kind of search to look for this author in this organization, and
it's much more targeted. Whereas Google can be a bit rough and ready, but it
does usually find the person you're looking for. And then you might have to
click in on Google image search as well. You know what they look like and their
name, but they might have a common name, you know, when you've got to kind of
go, oh yeah, that's the person I'm at the conference, yeah, that's definitely
them. You might be biased for the library stuff, huh? Slightly, yeah. I've been
hearing a lot about it from my wife. So everything that you guys have pointed
out of where you would start with are things that a researcher can manage
themselves very easily, actually. Everything sort of runs with a different
account, but you just have a key chain of different accounts to manage
everyone's interactions with things like Scopus or Google Scholar and so on. And
it doesn't take that long to set up. I guess this conversation is already going
towards, like, you should probably start having some kind of online presence,
like some profiles. Yeah, I think so. But I like your previous point, Lee, like
you're already in the community and you're already invested. And I think that
for me is one of the critical differences between how someone who's marketing
something to an audience, to a set of customers or clients, whereas we're sort
of marketing to a set of peers who are in a community with us and they know
about us or they know someone we've worked with or they know a cohort or they
know whatever, and they can, we're already kind of, they always say, like, the
first problem is you need to kind of establish or they need to be aware of you
or they need to, you've got to get your foot in the door kind of thing. They
have all this different lingo. And it's like, we already get, we get that for
free. And really, it's just capitalizing on that when someone does want to look
us up, because we're producing our work, like people see our papers, they see,
even if you don't publish, if you're quite junior, still in PhD or whatever, and
you might not have a publication out, there are outputs you're putting out,
you're putting posters out in conferences, or you're putting your thing, your
lab is doing stuff, your name is listed with your lab. So when they look up your
boss, they see you, and they go, oh, this is this person, and they click
through. And if that thing is like nothing, if there's nothing behind that, when
they start clicking through, it's really disappointing for me. I find it very,
very disappointing when I try to find out more about someone and this, even the
basic stuff is just not available. Or it's just their name and their photo. And
that's it. No other information whatsoever. Yeah. Name, photo, they work in this
department. Okay. More often, not even, when I worked in Sanger for many years,
they had a policy where they didn't list the staff on a directory, it was only
the PIs. And that only changed much more recently, where then they started
taking photos and having personal pages for each employee. So it's quite a,
quite a different thing. So if you're, if you are like a first year PhD student
in bioinformatics or related, are you kind of indicating that the first steps
would be to make sure you get on the lab web pages, or if you're at a
conference, make sure you get listed? I think if you ask people about, if you
ask like a marketing person or online person or people who are interested in
search engines, they will say the best place to put yourself is your
organization's website, especially if it's an academic or government one.
Because those in a search engine always rank highest. They are reputable brick
and mortar organizations. They are trusted. So you want to associate yourself
with that thing. They already have, and it's easy for PhD student or a
researcher or anybody, because you already have a space normally. I know that
they have profile pages. If you're part of a doctoral training program in the
UK, they always have, they usually have a page for all of the students of that
cohort, which you can kind of get modified. You can add to that profile. If
you're a researcher or staff, they always have a staff, usually these days, they
always have a staff page. If you look people up, 60% of the time it works every
time, kind of thing. But that's the best place to start because that's the first
thing that's going to come up. That's the first, and everyone's going to see,
oh, it's Lee at Georgia. Like they're going to click on it. That's like, yeah, I
believe that's a real place. I will click on the webpage and see, well, whatever
you write there, that's like the first impression. So yeah, go for it. Make the
most of that. And then if you do have publications, Google Scholar is probably
the next easiest thing to do, because as soon as you sign in, it says, which are
your publications? You click, click, and there you go. And then Google self
promotes their own stuff in the search results. So someone's looking for a
random paper, they will push your profile higher. Yeah. But only if you claim
the profile. That's the thing I've noticed. If you don't claim the profile, it
starts shifting down to the bottom of the first page. If you take control of it,
it's like the top five easily. And it takes five minutes because you just have
to verify your academic email if you want. And yeah, exactly. Just tidy up your
publications and say, which are yours? And that's it. It automatically pulls in
everything else from crawling it from PubMed or whatever. So you don't have to
do anything once it's set up. And one of the good things actually about Google
Scholar is if it finds different copies of your paper and different places are
in the net, it'll link those together to make it as easy as possible for someone
to find stuff. Because sometimes you'll get, even if you have an open access
paper, the publisher will block it and demand that you  pay, I don't know, $50
to rent for 48 hours, like some kind of blockbuster thing. But actually, we'll
often link to the preprint, that kind of thing, if you have it. So it makes it
quite easy to find papers. Yeah, it's really good. It's also really good for
merging preprints and publications so that the citation count all contribute to
one paper. I never thought about merging the preprint stuff with my
publications. Okay, good tip. Yeah, it's really handy because otherwise, because
then you add them up anyway. I think if you were ever going to talk about how
many times has this been cited, you would include both the preprint and the
final peer-reviewed paper in that count. So it just does it for you once you
merge it. Something a lot of organizations push is the ORCID IDs, where you get
a unique, big, long, random number that I never can remember. And then you're
supposed to put that in if you're reviewing or if you're authoring papers, that
kind of thing, and then it links backwards. It can be a bit hit and miss.
Sometimes, some journals will take ORCIDs and automatically update everything.
Other times, you have to go in and manually add it later on. So it doesn't work
as easy, actually, as Google Scholar, but it is meant to be more curated and
more stable. ORCID, I think, has backing from a lot of academic institutions.
I'm not sure which publishing groups, but I have run into publishing groups that
make it mandatory that you provide an ORCID as an author. I want to say Nature
Publishing Group, but I'm not 100% sure. Anything which uses that horrible
editorial manager backend usually allows you to log in with ORCID. I always
talked about it as ORCID IDs, but now that you're saying it, it makes perfect
sense. It's ORCID. I mentally say ORCID, but you started saying ORCID, and I was
like, that's a cool name. I thought it is ORCID. They even color code the ORC as
one color and the ID as another. I've always been saying it as ORCID ID. ORCID
is good. I'm not sure what it's actually pronounced. Open Researcher and
Contributor ID. Great. I'm sure that's a backer name. All right. I got it. On
their FAQ, how should ORCID be pronounced? Answer, as an international
organization, we have encountered many different types. That's the right way to
say it. What is the right way to say its name? Is it ORCID or ORCID or SID, I
guess? We are not that picky as long as you register and use your ID. But for
those who want to know, ORCID has two syllables and a hard C. What?
Phonetically, it is pronounced as orchid. I usually tell people it is pronounced
like flower orchid, but spelled without the H. There you go. Orchid. I'm sorry.
I win. All right. You win. But then it's ORCID ID then, so it's like double ID.
Yeah, we'll add that to the show notes. Feel free to discuss amongst, yeah,
everyone can discuss what the proper thing should be. Maybe we should put that
as a poll. Or not. But yeah, ORCID is a bit fiddly sometimes. I like it because
it sort of maintains a CV. It's good to keep track of things for yourself. You
can add an extra information like your employment record, education record, all
the dates for that. So when you need to fill in a form, you can just go and look
at it. It pulls in the publications, but it also allows you to put in grant
funding, awards, and peer review. It tracks peer review. Yeah. It's a new thing
now that most journals are trying to get peer review acknowledged. They won't
say which paper you've reviewed, but they will say this guy or this gal has
reviewed for us, and you can have it linked to your ORCID. And so they'll update
the ORCID record automatically if you let them. What's that? ORCID, right?
ORCID. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But I think that leads into another
resource that I like. You guys might not use it called Publons. I signed up for
it and I technically use it, but I don't think I've ever logged in. So I don't
really know why I do it. Tell me why I do it. So this replaces Web of Science
Researcher ID. So for the librarians out there, this is an account that allows
you to manipulate what's shown on your Web of Science. Which is like a
commercial company? Yeah. It used to be Voiders. I don't know who owns it now.
Is it Thompson Web of Science? It's probably owned by Elsevier. It's one of
those things where it's sort of owned a little bit by everybody, I guess. But
what it is, is it's a citation database and it's a publication database. And I
don't think we use it so much, but in other spheres, I know particularly like
for social sciences, they use this database a lot to look up papers. And authors
have a profile on it. And if you're someone who's not coming from specifically
Elsevier and you're looking for papers or you're trying to find things like
citation metrics about someone, you might be using Web of Science to calculate
that. So it's good to keep an eye on it. So that's one thing that you get with
the Publons account. But the main thing of the Publons account is that it tracks
your peer review work. So when you review for a journal anonymously, you notify
Publons, you just sort of shoot them an email, or you can, if the journal is
hooking it into things, it'll come up any automatically. And they will add it to
your profile. So you can show how many times you've reviewed for what journals
you reviewed for. So now mine has, if you look up my profile, it shows you that
I seem to regularly review for microbial genomics. So that's good to know. And
for me, I forget, like I forget what I've reviewed. I just sort of do it. So
then when I want to write like, oh, I'm like a scientist, and I do things that I
help out with peer review, and I've done eight times for microbial genomics, and
I've done a couple for nature communications, or look at me, I'm fantastic. It's
great for that kind of fodder, which you need to add to applications. I mean,
it's an important thing to do. Although you are giving your data away to a huge
commercial company worth billions, so that they can then use it and sell it on
back to your organization when a different format. That's the, that's the thing
of being free. If you're not paying for it, are you the customer? Are you the
product? Yeah, it is an interesting scholarly communications question. The
resources there, it's handy. I think, yeah, that is a, that is a thing. Publons
and this sort of thing is kind of has that commercial black box behind it, which
is not as nice. I'm looking through it. I search for your name, and I search for
my name as a nice interface. That's a really nice interface, and it's got a lot
of nice metrics, which you can just copy paste into things. It says I've only
reviewed four things, so I guess I have not been loading things into there. I've
been doing, I've been doing thankless reviews, I guess. If the journal allows
you to, you can have it linked directly to the ORCID, and you can bypass the
whole Publons thing if you're not comfortable with that, that's fine. But either
way, I think it's important that we sort of measure how much peer review we do
do, because we do it for free. It's a community service. I spend, how long does
it take you to review a paper? Five minutes if it's terrible. That's the right
answer. I'm slow at it. Sometimes I'll just read like the abstract, and I'll go,
there is not a chance that I'm going to review this, or it should be like an
editorial reject. And often I'll tell the editor, just reject this straight out,
and I don't bother actually doing any more of it. Do you guys not do that? I
guess I just say no to the, I don't even accept the review if it looks terrible,
I guess. Or if it looks outside my field, definitely. Like I'll get things that
might be for foodborne diseases, which sounds like it could be my field, but
then it's all about the serotyping part of the wet lab, and that's totally
outside of my purview. So I say no. When I get those misfired to me, maybe I'm
also avoiding really bad papers. I don't know. Yeah, I tend to do the same. I
kind of screen, because they give you the abstract, and at least part of the
author list. Not always. Not always, not always the author list, but the editor.
And normally if I don't know the editor, and I don't know the journal, I'm like,
and if the abstract doesn't jump out of me, I'll just say, look, this isn't, I
don't think this is my thing. I think that this is a nice thing to do. If I know
that it's terrible, but I know it can be improved, I actually do spend time
critiquing and telling them what to do. And I don't have to, I can just reject
it in five minutes, but I guess I'm being a little bit nice. Yeah, I think ones
that you like, but they've kind of got the sort of 50-50, those take the
longest, because I do try to critique them and help them out. I kind of want
them to do well with it. But then that takes up, I usually do it after hours,
and it usually takes me at least three hours per review. You're still faster
than me. I take like two days. I'm so slow. I need lessons. Maybe another
podcast, you guys can teach me how to do that. How to review, how to review a
paper, or like how to lose a guy in 10 days, how to review a paper in 10
minutes. Great title. Let's not forget that one. Let's do it. All right, we'll
do that next time. Well, let's move on. I think there's other resources we can
talk about. I mean, Twitter. Yay. Twitter. Twitter. I mean, when did you all
start being on Twitter as a...  in that sort of research professional academic
capacity. 2007. I'm what you call like an early adopter. Congratulations. I
guess this is a lot outside of this podcast, but what made you decide to go that
early into Twitter? One of my friends set up like an email service for, I don't
know, news alerts. And Twitter at that time would send an SMS to your phone for
like people you followed. And so that's why I set it up initially, get the
tweets by text. Of course, Twitter obviously realized that this is horrifically
expensive and stopped doing that very shortly after that. They were really lucky
that they managed to, at that same point when they realized that they couldn't
afford this anymore, the smartphones and having like this kind of always on
internet became affordable and became like a thing. So, and mobiles were like
powerful enough to have an app that shows something like Twitter. So they
managed to transition without too much of an issue, but it was based around the
size of a text message, which is totally anachronistic now because nobody
doesn't do that anymore at all. I have a similar thing as Andrew when I started,
but I started back in, I was still in undergrad. So we had to use Twitter as
part of computing, learning about social media and all these different
platforms. Interesting. So back to Twitter, how does it help you guys in
revealing yourself to the world and broadcasting yourselves? How does it help
with your online presence, I guess? Well, I suppose that's where I get all my
papers from and preprints from, and I don't get them from anywhere else. And
that's where I promote all my papers and stuff like that and podcasts and
whatnot. It's kind of my link into the wider community that I don't necessarily
know, but they can tune in if they feel like. Yeah, I agree. Whenever I have a
paper at all, I'll push it out there and five people will like that tweet, I
guess. I don't have as many people as somebody if I started in 2007, but some
people see when I tweet. It's quality, not quantity. Yes. Are there other ways
that having a Twitter helps you out? I think you get a lot of casual discussion,
or at least you used to. You used to get a lot of casual discussion on Twitter
about publications as they came up or discussion around, it used to be a good
way to push blog posts and other materials, press releases, or whatever you've
got floating around, or even like GitHub code, and you've done a project, you've
done a release, you tweeted, whatever it is. Because people are on it, they're
sort of thumbing through all of the, the doom scrolling through all of the
tweets anyway, they might see your thing and click through. And there used to be
some pretty heated discussions on stuff like what's the best read mapper and all
that back circa 2000 and 2009, 2010 kind of thing. Are you thinking of a
specific conversation? Cause now I want to know about it. No, no. Well, there is
a like controversial papers in your field. Like there was that SARS-CoV-2 paper
recently and they got published in MDPI vaccines. And that, you know, that got
slammed on Twitter and then people piled in and then the journal retracted it.
Yeah. I mean, if you want a modern example of where Twitter is powerful, you can
look at the SARS-CoV-2 coverage, especially coming out of virological posts or
what Dextrane puts up or so on. That's really powerful. I mean, that's where
you're, if you want the skinny on what's going on, you can just look up those
accounts, just keep track of those and exactly what's going on. That's good. And
speaking of earlier, when you said you would link to like a blog post, I see
people just doing whole threads on Twitter now and they put a little thread
emoticon. I don't think people are linking to blogs too much anymore. I had a
blog back in the day. It was andrewjpage.com and I had it for about 10 years.
I've let it expired in the past few years. It's not something I do anymore. As a
late tech blog, like for my PhD, I did lots of late tech and stuff like that.
And so it was just random place to put all my scripts and it was actually quite
popular, but then there was no need for it. I didn't want to maintain it. I
didn't want to host it. And it just kind of disappeared, unfortunately. There's
a few blogs, and I think blogs are really powerful, but I think we can discuss
blogs like on its own, but there are a few that have persisted over the years.
And that's like Phil Ashton has started up posting on his one again. Titus Brown
always has stuff. Mick Watson always has stuff. The people have been doing this
forever and they always release their information through these sites. And it is
useful. And the only way I check them is if it shows up on the Twitter feed.
That's true. But I guess we can talk about personal websites and blogs like as a
resource and what you both think of that. I guess they persist. Even if you move
jobs or whatever, your personal website will stay there and act as a portfolio.
It's quite good when you're trying to hire someone and they do have a personal
website that you can go and see and check out all the different projects, kind
of all the different linked work that they've done often. It's kind of buried.
It might be in GitHub, but it might be buried in 20 different repos. And maybe
they've done one or two really good pieces of work and then the rest are just
minor tweaks to existing open source software, but it can be kind of difficult
to untangle those. Whereas if you do have a personal website, it can help
signpost to those pieces of work. Your website, Andrew. Did someone buy it? It
redirected to Volvo cars. Well, it could be worse then in terms of redirections.
Yeah. I just got a blank page. Okay. That's probably better. So I think the
personal webpage, the downside of that is it's a thing. It's your thing. You
have to look after it. So things like you have a WordPress site and that can
stay up for years, but those have, eventually they usually have some security
vulnerabilities over time. They can get hacked and you can have weird things
showing up when you don't really want them to. So it is like a thing, like it
can be up, but you kind of still have to look after it. And it's coming back to
what you're saying, Andrew. It's just sort of not at a point, it's sort of too
much effort. It can be quite a lot of effort to keep something like that
together. And it doesn't necessarily look that nice if the last post was five
years ago and it's got all of like outdated information from two jobs ago or
whatever. It doesn't look good. So it is like out of all of the resources we've
talked about, I think that's the one I'd recommend the least because of the
amount of overhead to keep it going. Well, thinking back about my blog, probably
all the information is still valid now because LaTeX hasn't changed very much in
the past 20 years. Yeah, there are definitely processes which sort of generate a
static site, which is just very secure because it's very simple. And those I
think is probably the best way if you're thinking of an implementation of how to
do it. Obviously you need to know a little bit of how to code it up or what
platform to use. The different ones for like whatever language, like Ruby or
JavaScript or Python, that different, there's usually like a favorite one to do
that sort of static site, but that would be the best way to do it. Seeing a lot
of people using GitHub actually to host their personal web pages. Yeah, so
that's running Jekyll and Ruby in the background. And then it's, but you don't
need to know about that. It just takes your markdown files and then just renders
something for you as long as you write it the right way. And that's free hosting
to have that up. And it's like a static thing. And you can just put that, it'll
be something, something.github.io and you just can point that. So it can be
lcats.github.io. Yeah, so I actually really liked that a lot. It was really easy
to set up actually for our podcast website. Yeah, for the podcast website, we
use it for the MicroBimfy conference as well. It was super easy to do, free,
it's there forever. So one thing you should do actually is sign up to GitHub if
you are doing coding and doing Bonformatics applications, and just make sure
that people can find it easily. Like don't have some random name, like, I don't
know, lighthouseseagull52. You want something that people can find you maybe
with your name. And then you can use your GitHub pages like a portfolio of your
professional work that you've done over maybe multiple different employers. I
know not every employer will allow you to do it. And then also within any
scripts that you make, if those make it into Conda or whatever, make sure you
put your name inside so that people know that you made this stuff. So when they
do like dash help or dash H, that they will say, oh, this is Andrew's script or
this is the paper he wrote which underlies this actual script. And maybe I
should go and read it and cite it. That's a very simple thing you can do, but
most people kind of forget that. Totally agree. Definitely like in all of your
scripts you should have like dash dash help or even dash dash citation,
something like that. Give yourself credit. Yeah, definitely. Definitely worth
putting that up on all of your code. And also I'll add like, maybe people are a
bit reluctant to put up code because it's not quite polished and it's not
something that's designed for other people to use perhaps. It's like a dirty
script that does some munging of data or something like that. It doesn't matter.
If you're in a state and that's all you've got to show, put it up. It's worth it
than having nothing. Something you're trying to achieve and by hell or high
water, you've managed to do it. You write something that achieves it. That's a
plus in my book. If you're able to do that.  basic as getting a job like
honestly if somebody shows me that they've done a script and they've done
something and they show and i'm not gonna go spy on them on google or something
but if they have like a url going back to their script it lets me look at their
script and it lets me see what they've done and lets me objectively judge that
sort of going off topic but i think it's sort of this it's the devil kind of
kind of situation like even if the person you can assess it like most people are
actually much better than they think they are that's the first thing but even if
they're not quite to the standard that's required for a particular role it's
good like an employer will want to know that because they might still say like
yes this person still has at least has demonstrated where they're at it's a
technical sort of difference of where they need to get to but they've got
everything else they've got enthusiasm they've got a good attitude they've got a
good background on the on the rest of the science so that helps you make that
decision and then that makes you more likely to to talk to them and take them to
the next stage of the process if there's no information there's no judgment
you're going to just say well i don't know i can't i have this project i have
two years to do it i don't want to take a chance also when you're doing stuff
publicly as you go along like other people can see it and that's a good thing
because then maybe someone is looking for something similar or is going to
design the same tool and then they go and contact you that's uh that's a bonus
and two has better than one and you can maybe get in more publications or people
can find you much quicker because it's established great point i think it's good
in terms of transparency and honesty to just be like yeah it's not perfect but
here it is this is what i can do and that's that's a respectful thing putting
yourself out there that's a lot of courage like it means a lot if you see that
so definitely for i know a lot of students tune in who don't necessarily have
all these fancy programs just put the code up it's fine if it's some dirty r
script that just does does some plots it's good to know that you can do it yeah
we're still not reddit first there aren't a lot of trolls looking at your code
right now so you can put it up and get actual constructive criticisms when you
put it up and then something uh really self-promotional that i learned from
nabil was to put the micro benfrey podcast link in my email signature and that
has spawned uh hopefully a few people uh tuning in and finding it but it's such
a simple thing and i hadn't it hadn't even occurred to me until i saw it in the
bills email signature then i stole it and i need to do that great idea yeah i
think that's a good tip for everybody people to thumb through that email
signature and it's a good not don't go nuts i got an email today where someone
had written they had like 20 different of these little pictures from the
organization there's little pictures like blah blah blah excellence 100 years
blah blah blah something i know like some people have to do that but that's like
no don't go that don't go overboard don't write a thesis in the in every email
signature but pick two links pick two links that are really important to your
best foot forward kind of thing institutional website github or google if your
organization website isn't up to up to par orc id github google scholar github
or your twitter whatever whatever you use the most whatever you want people to
kind of hit first and get their first impression of you pick the pick two of
those links and and put them in there and people will click too it's like yeah
it's a slow day you really got this email like yeah okay what's this about all
right you put like little emoticons next to the url also or something no no i
try to i try to keep my emails plain text if i can but what would you put like
winky face no like okay that makes me question it now no like a microphone oh
maybe there's a there's an emoticon and i think online presence all of what
we're saying also applies in terms of cvs and applications for things so plug
your github in your cv or in the or in your cover letter or in the tons of forms
that the hr makes you fill out just put it in there it helps point to things to
have it's it's a thing showing you have like a personality you have stuff going
on and you've outputs that are not just purely academic like papers and stuff
this is sort of a subjective question again would you would you self-promote
like in at the end of your talk at a conference or in your poster hell yeah oh
yeah okay depends on the talk but if you think about any talk is kind of an
advertisement for something else because i mean unless you're getting like a
nice one hour slot which you don't get i don't get you get 10 minutes you're not
going to explain a paper in 10 minutes you're going to explain like one thing
you're going to say this is great if you want more information click here's a
tiny url click to the manuscript or whatever the opposite and i i usually get
too much time and i don't know how to fill it up and so i usually shove in the
relevant micro benefit podcast episode that we have because you always have one
that's relevant to something are we getting to that stage already that's great
we are yeah particularly for the coronavirus stuff it's like i gave a few talks
recently and was always the last slide a second that slide is just here is like
20 podcasts you can episodes you can listen to on this exact subject very good
yeah literature github twitter one thing i used to do i still do is i put my
twitter handle in on the title page for talks so be title nabeelfreedali khan at
happy underscore khan and that's just like because if it's like a random person
at a conference like that's easier for them to get in touch with me and we can
have a conversation about what's going on in the meeting over instead of going
to email which tends to get a bit lost or whatever that's my preferred form of
contact now maybe twitter is not your preferred preferred form of contact you
want to use email that's fine put that in i think twitter is better for that
sort of scenario but whatever different strokes but put something that's the one
thing we can learn from the marketing is like have this call to action always
present the thing and then give somewhere else to go what's the most
inappropriate place that you've seen someone advertise something most
inappropriate place people are generally well behaved i think yeah i think
academics haven't really figured that much out about all these soft platforms
for promotion yet and they haven't figured out how to abuse them that much the
one that sticks out to me in terms of self promotion where it's just not on is
the sort of self citations of papers that just aren't relevant i've seen that a
couple of times it looks really bad you know like because you cite one paper
just make the point right so you cite the first one you don't cite every single
paper you've done that says the same thing over and over again that's basically
referring back to what you found in the first publication so it'll be like ali
khan et al 2017 2018 2019 and you're like no no yeah that does look bad like no
that's really bad but that's that's more traditional thing i think yeah it's i
haven't seen too much gaming on on online platforms that much you made a really
good point about getting this kind of profile that kind of profile online but
they're usually dependent on citations and publications what do you do if you're
just starting out and you don't have any publications yeah this is this is a
tough one because ultimately as researchers our currency are publications and if
you don't have one it's it's a bit slow it's it's difficult to kind of get
traction you need to think about what you're actually trying to communicate and
what you want people to be aware of and it'll depend on your career stage of
what you want to promote right so if you're usually people who don't have
publications are going to be like fresh out of phd young phd students or early
early postdoc kind of thing what you want to promote you want to show that you
have a bunch of interests you have a bunch of technical skills that you're able
to communicate like you know pick which sort of thing you want to promote and
then you can do things like if you're allowed to now this is dependent on what
your organization and line managers and bosses say about this but you can
publish your slides from presentations and posters online on services like fig
chair it'll give you a doi so like a fixed link to it forever and you can put
that on that institutional website or on the blog or whatever we've been talking
about or tweet it out or whatever that you've done a thing and there's like a
there's an output that someone can go to and that's a really easy one but do
check don't just do it without people knowing you kind of have to check with all
the co-authors that it's okay to do that but most people are usually pretty
chill because you've already presented it at a conference anyway and it's just
more promotion of that worst case if they're very cagey about it you might have
to redact stuff like take the strain names out of the figures or something like
that but there is like a path you can come up with that will allow you to show
that you can do a thing without necessarily giving the game away other things
you can do is we've been talking about blog content blog content was great it
can be blog content can be a bit tricky because it's like if you're especially
if you're younger you might they might feel like you're you're not able to just
talk about the science that you do and maybe you feel that you don't have the
experience to talk about big concepts of the field yet but you can just talk
about a particular method a protocol how do you use a protocol what kit is good
for this what algorithm is good for that compare assemblers whatever something
really primitive  that you've kind of had a sketch at to how to go at for
yourself and you can put that up. If you have a wet lab protocol or even a
computational one, you can put it on protocols IO. That again is this online
free service to promote protocols, methodologies. And that again gives you a
DOI. That again is something that I think that actually gets indexed in Orkid as
well. So that's like an output that you can just use. We've talked about GitHub.
So yeah, scripts, get them on GitHub. If you don't like GitHub or you don't
wanna use GitHub, you can use GitLab. You can, at a push, you can use Bitbucket.
But it doesn't matter, get the code out there somewhere onto some sort of
version repository. Then you might find out of all of that, for some reason,
nothing you're actually doing is you can, everything is too sensitive and you
can't put anything out. So no scripts, no methods, no nothing. You can, at the
end of the day, like at least just write short reviews or praises for
publications you've read. So just the kind of classic reaction video kind of
YouTube content about papers. There's absolutely no original work that you're
putting in. You don't have to say anything about what you're doing. Just talk
about other people's work. Did you like it? What did you like about it? How does
it help you? I've seen some really good stuff about that. Who was it who just
put out a big thing about, someone had like a nice blog post about MASH and I'm
forgetting right now whose blog I was reading. That's gonna kill me. Whose blog
was I reading? John Lee's. No, it was Phil. He put out a good blog post about
all that stuff. And it wasn't like he made original bioinformatics like
sketching work or anything, right? But he was looking over it and seeing how it
fit his purpose and it was a great article. Yeah, no, that one was really
interesting. I read that one. There's another one about genome sketches from
John Lee's which is also really interesting. Had no specifics about what he was
doing but it was super helpful even just to talk like a toy example. How does
this pull this thing apart? How does it work? And it can be just the same thing
about any publication. It's just, I think the thing is is that you just want to
show people what you're about and publications are a very easy way to do it
because they can just see exactly how you've done a body of work. But you can
kind of get a lot of stuff out there that doesn't have to be perfect. Yeah, so.
But the one thing I think Andrew will advise to everybody is. Oh yeah, don't
start a podcast. That's a lot of work and you'll just interfere with us and take
away our audience. So we're happy to work with you though. Yeah. If you started
another podcast, go for it. I would say go for it because, okay, fine. But it is
a lot of work. It's unnecessary work. It is a fair bit of work and that's why
there's not many of them out there because it's just, it takes a lot of time.
Yeah, no, I think we discussed the production process in sort of a previous
episode. If you're interested, you can have a listen to that and that'll give
you some idea of the amount of work required. So hopefully that was interesting
for everybody. We just wanted to talk about this. When we talk about online
presence and when people in our organization prod us about it, we feel that it's
very complicated and it's a lot of work. It's not our job to do it. And that is
true. It is not our job to necessarily be pushing our agenda every single day,
but there are some very simple tactics you can use. And we've gone through a lot
of them in this episode that you can just make those changes. It will help other
researchers find you, find your work. And who knows from that, what will come
out, invitations to work on collaborations, to be co-funded for grants, jobs,
just invited speaker spots, just all the list, come and wanna just hang out,
just chat, it's okay. Come over, come visit. We'll talk sharp about whatever it
is. So it's, but it's really important that you kind of improve your online
visibility. And so that's mainly why we were talking about it so long today. And
yeah, so that's it from Andrew, Lee and myself. That's it for this episode of
the MicroBinfee podcast. And we'll see you next time. Thank you so much for
listening to us at home. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us
on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or the platform of your choice. Follow us on
Twitter at MicroBinfee. And if you don't like this podcast, please don't do
anything. This podcast was recorded by the Microbial Bioinformatics Group. The
opinions expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of
CDC or the Quadrant Institute.