TL;DR: Publishing research is not the same as getting it into the hands of people who can use it. Peer-reviewed journals matter, but social media can be a valuable tool for helping researchers reach practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, and the public. The goal is not to turn every academic into an influencer. It is to make good research easier to find, understand, and use.
I recently read something about how scientists and academics sometimes roll their eyes at the idea of becoming social media “influencers.” That sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I found plenty of articles and posts arguing that researchers should be doing more on social media. That is perhaps not terribly surprising when you are looking for them on LinkedIn, but it got me thinking about something I have believed for a long time. We place an enormous amount of value on publishing in top peer-reviewed journals, and we should. Peer review does some important things. It separates a lot of the wheat from the chaff, challenges our thinking, makes us defend our methods, and forces us to demonstrate that our conclusions are actually supported by something. Then, sometimes, we give all that good information a very nice place to die.
A few years ago, a friend published in one of the top journals in my field. I pulled up the issue and noticed another friend had an article in the same issue, so I asked the first friend if they had seen it. Nope. Were they going to read it? Probably not. That conversation has always stuck with me, so I decided I would read it myself. I made it about two pages. I skimmed a good chunk of the literature review, skipped the methodology, worked my way through some of the results, and eventually got to the discussion. Ah, there it was. Good stuff. Good science. Useful findings. Some interesting things to think about. Nothing that was going to completely revolutionize the profession, but solid research worthy of a very good journal. And I remember thinking, who is going to read this who can actually use it?
Editors read it. Reviewers read it. Researchers working on closely related topics might find it. Graduate students will certainly encounter articles like it because people like me make them read them. All of that matters. But what about the professionals working in the field? Many do not have easy access to academic journals, and even if they do, they may not have the time or desire to sit down after a full day of work and read a 20-page research article written primarily for reviewers and other academics. Sometimes we academics get frustrated by that and say, “Practitioners need to read the research.” Sure. But maybe we also need to ask whether our approach to research dissemination and knowledge translation is putting that work into a form they can realistically use.
That does not mean every piece of scholarship needs to be aimed at the general public. If you are doing basic cancer research, for example, your most important audience may very well be other scientists who can take what you learned and move the work another step forward. But many of us work in applied fields like education, business, recreation, public administration, health, community development, leadership, and plenty of others. If the purpose of our research is ultimately to help improve what people do in the real world, at some point the information has to make it into the real world. Research impact depends on more than publication. It also depends on whether useful knowledge reaches the people who can act on it.
That is where I think social media for academics and researchers deserves much more serious consideration. Not as a replacement for journals, and not as a replacement for conferences. I am also not suggesting that every professor needs to become a TikTok star or start chasing clicks. Social media can simply be another form of science communication, academic outreach, and research dissemination, and increasingly, I think it is an important one. Practitioners are there. Community leaders are there. Policymakers are there. Students are there. People who are simply curious are there. They may never search an academic database for your article, and they may never know the report exists, but they might stop for a LinkedIn post that explains one finding. They might watch a short video, see a graphic, listen to a podcast, or follow a link because something you shared made them think, “That actually applies to what we are dealing with.”
In my own field, Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plans, or SCORPs, are a good example. These plans can contain incredibly rich information about recreation needs, participation, communities, trends, priorities, public input, and much more. There can be tremendous energy surrounding their development, and then the final report comes out and too often much of that information metaphorically sits on a shelf. The information is technically available, but available and communicated are not necessarily the same thing. Could some of that information be broken down at the county level? Could a finding become a post directed toward local park and recreation professionals? Could researchers make a short presentation for a community? Could one useful piece of a large report become a graphic that gets passed around among professionals who otherwise would never open the full document? I do not think there is one answer. The audience should help determine the format.
I also do not think “simplification” is automatically a bad word. I cannot intelligently read an astrophysics paper about black holes, but I can listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the basic idea and come away understanding something I did not understand before. Was a tremendous amount of detail left out? Of course. That is the point. Good science communication does not require preserving every methodological detail in every communication. The goal is to stay true to the research, be honest about what it says, avoid distorting the findings, know your audience, and then communicate with them in a way that gives them a realistic chance of engaging with the information.
And yes, this is more work. Anyone who has spent months, sometimes years, getting a manuscript finished knows how much energy has already gone into the process. Now I am suggesting we think about another post, a video, a professional summary, or some other way of communicating the work? I get it. But I also think new tools make that process easier than it once was. AI tools for researchers, used thoughtfully, can help identify the most useful pieces of a study, think through potential audiences, adapt language for different groups, brainstorm formats, develop posts or scripts, understand SEO and GEO, and build a reasonable research dissemination plan. The researcher still has to be the expert and still has to make sure the information is accurate, but we have tools that can make the translation process much less daunting.
There is another reason I think this matters. Higher education is not exactly enjoying unlimited public goodwill right now, and perhaps we have contributed to that problem. For a long time, we have been very good at talking to one another. We publish in our journals, attend our conferences, present to rooms filled largely with other academics, and celebrate when our peers review and accept our work. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but then we sometimes wonder why people outside higher education do not understand what universities contribute. Maybe better higher education outreach and public engagement are part of the answer. Maybe we need to show people more of the useful work happening inside our institutions.
Our job is to educate students, certainly, but our expertise, scholarship, research, and creative work should also help the larger world. If we dismiss social media as beneath serious academics while much of the world increasingly uses those platforms to find and digest information, we may be contributing to the very disconnect we complain about. Times changed. The way people find information changed. That does not mean scholarship has to become clickbait. It means we might need to become better at meeting people where they are, being useful, being accurate, staying true to the work, and being there for the people who want to find us.
I am thinking about writing a follow-up piece about what research dissemination through social media could actually look like in practice, at least from my point of view. What should researchers share? Where should we share it? How do we decide what belongs on LinkedIn versus Instagram, YouTube, a blog, a podcast, or somewhere else? Where can AI genuinely help, and how do we do all of this without losing the integrity of the work?
I would really like to hear from both academics and practitioners. What research or information do you wish were easier to find and understand? And for the researchers out there, what gets in the way of sharing more of your work beyond the journal page?
This article was originally published on my LinkedIn page, where I first shared these thoughts as part of a broader conversation about research, outreach, and the role of social media in academic work. To view, please visit: www.linkedin.com/in/mikeisoutside