Researchers can be a bit sniffy about attention. There is an understandable belief that good work should speak for itself: do the research properly, publish it in the right journal and the people who need to know about it will find it.
Sometimes they will, but quite often they will not.
There is an enormous amount of research being published, alongside reports, conferences, newsletters, webinars and podcasts. Everyone is competing for a limited amount of attention, including people whose work is not especially good but who are much better at telling you about it.
That may be unfair, but it is also the situation we are in.
I spend much of my working life trying to get people to notice research, and more importantly the people doing it. Dementia Researcher publishes blogs [1], records podcasts [2], runs events and promotes jobs and funding calls. When all that is done, I look at the figures to see whether any of it worked.
Sometimes a podcast that took days to prepare attracts almost no interest, while something fairly simple takes off for reasons I simply can’t explain (I still don’t know why our Eye as a Biomarker Podcast [3] got 17,000 plays in a single month, almost a year after it was first published. However, I can probably guess why our recent show “Relay LIVE: Sex, Gender and FTD in Focus [4]” did so well). It just goes to show that attention does not always go where it’s deserved.
Because of all that, I can understand why some researchers would rather keep their distance from the whole business. They do not want to chase likes or turn themselves into a personal brand. They want to get on with the research.
Fair enough, but avoiding the ‘attention economy’ sadly doesn’t make it disappear. It just leaves other people (who might not be the best people) to occupy the space.
Remember, research only has value beyond the research team when somebody else knows it exists.
That might be another academic, a clinician, a policymaker, a charity or someone directly affected by the issue being studied. All of them are busy, and very few are just sitting around waiting for your latest paper to appear.
You have to give them a reason to notice it.
I am not suggesting that this means dancing on TikTok beside a graph of your results (although I know people who do this). It means accepting that communication is part of the research process.
Publishing the paper is not the end of the job. It is the point where the work of getting the findings read and used begins.
Believe it or not, most people do not care about a study simply because it has been published (who knew). Researchers care about the method, sample and analysis. Everybody else usually starts somewhere more basic. They want to know why it matters? Who it affects? What might change because of it?
Those are not silly questions, or evidence that people need the research dumbed down. They are how people decide whether to keep reading.
And I think academic communication often gets the order wrong. It begins with the full project title, the funder, the institutions involved and a lengthy explanation of the method (or even worse… yet another definition of Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia). The reason anybody should care appears somewhere around paragraph eight.
You see the same thing at conferences, where somebody has ten minutes to explain three years of work and spends the first four describing the structure of the presentation. By the time they reach the interesting part, half the room is checking email.
What works better is to start with why the work matters, then explain how you did it. That does not mean exaggerating the findings or pretending an association is a cure (there is already enough of that about). It means making the value of the work easier to see while being clear about what the study can and cannot tell us.
Trust me, try it… next time your presenting start with the headlines, and work backwards – don’t save the results for the end.
That brings me to the next important point. To do the comms right, researchers also need to become more comfortable with repetition. I know that, by the time a paper is published, the research team may have been discussing it for years. They have rewritten the abstract, argued about the figures, and they are probably thoroughly sick of it. But it’s important to remember that everybody else is seeing it for the first time.
Posting about a paper once on LinkedIn is not much of a communications plan. It is placing one message into a very fast-moving stream and hoping the right person happens to be looking at that exact moment you hit send.
Believe it or not… you can talk about the same work more than once without becoming tedious. You can explain the main finding, discuss something unexpected, or focus on what the results mean for a particular group. It may feel repetitive to you, but most of the people you are trying to reach probably missed it the first time.
It’s also important to consider that ‘the paper’ shouldn’t also be the only version of the research. Sure, it’s there for people who need the full detail, but others may need a short explanation, an infographic (Notebook LM does great ones) a presentation, a podcast or a conversation.
Now I know that some academics will worry that simplifying research removes the complexity. It can, if it is done badly, but complexity should not become an excuse for being impossible to understand.
Good communication can include uncertainty. You can say that the sample was small, the findings are early or more work is needed. People can cope with uncertainty when it is explained properly. What they struggle with is being asked to decode a paragraph written for three reviewers and nobody else.
It’s also important to remember that people respond to people. Academic writing removes most signs of the person behind the work, which is appropriate for a paper but does not need to carry over into everything else.
In other communications, outside the paper you can take time to explain why you became interested in the question or what surprised you. None of that makes the research less serious. It makes it easier to understand and remember. It builds the story and this matters for careers as well as research impact.
Bear with me while I explain.
People often talk about networking as though it means standing at a conference reception trying to join a circle of senior academics who have arranged themselves so there is no obvious way in. But it really can be much simpler – someone reads a post you wrote, listened to a podcast you recorded about your work, and remembers your name. Months later, they are putting together a project and, hey, maybe they think of you.
(I can prove this, but you will have to watch this space for a paper I am working on, where we looked at how researchers have benefitted from writing blogs, joining our podcast or presenting in the salon.)
Of course… writing a blog, isn’t a guaranteed route to a job or grant, and anyone promising that ten LinkedIn posts will transform your career is talking rubbish. But visibility helps people understand what you do, and that matters when collaborations and opportunities are being discussed.
The aim is not to become generally well known. Academic fame is a fairly disappointing sort of fame anyway. But I think being known for something specific is a good thing. Think for a moment, what do you want to be known for? e.g. tell the truth when you think of centenarian studies. which is the name that immediately comes to mind, I bet is a certain person from UMC Amsterdam. When somebody needs a particular skill, perspective or bit of knowledge, they should have some chance of thinking of you.
That usually comes from talking consistently about the work you are already doing, rather than inventing an online personality. You can have several interests, but it helps to give people a clear starting point.
There are limits to all this. Researchers can spend so much time talking about their work that they have very little time left to do it. Universities can also confuse visibility with impact because attention is easy to count.
A post with 50,000 views looks impressive in a report. A conversation with the right group of clinicians may change practice and leave no useful figure behind. So remember sometimes reaching the right 20 people may matter more than 20,000 random views (I tell myself this when I look at some of the attendance numbers for our webinars). It all depends on what you were trying to achieve.
I want to wrap up with some basic guidance…
The most useful question to ask before posting anything: what do I want to happen because somebody sees this? Do you want researchers to read the paper, participants to join a study, clinicians to use a resource or potential collaborators to get in touch? If your answer is “Raising awareness”, it probably means you just haven’t worked out the answer.
So, once you know what you want to happen, the rest becomes easier. You know who you need to reach and what they need from you. You may discover that social media is not the answer at all. A direct email or a conversation with the right organisation might do far more.
Tapping into the ‘attention economy’ does not mean doing whatever the algorithm rewards that week. It means understanding that attention is usually the first step towards somebody reading, listening, responding or acting.
Researchers are trained to produce knowledge. They receive far less help with getting that knowledge beyond the people who already agree it is interesting.
So remember, you do not need to become an influencer, buy a ring light or develop a personal logo. You do need to make it possible for people to find your work, understand why it matters and remember who did it.
Good research does not always speak for itself. Sometimes it needs a bit of help, and getting that out there might help your career too.
Adam Smith
Author
Adam Smith [5]was born in the north, a long time ago. He wanted to write books, but ended up working in the NHS, and at the Department of Health. He is now Programme Director at University College London (which probably sounds more important than it is – his words). He has led a number of initiatives to improve dementia research (including this website, Join Dementia Research & ENRICH), as well as pursuing his own research interests. In his spare time, he grows vegetables, builds Lego, likes rockets & spends most of his time drinking too much coffee and squeezing technology into his house.
Follow @betterresearch.bsky.social [7]