This document discusses using Twitter as an academic and provides tips for doing so effectively. It notes that Twitter can be used to brand oneself, find relevant papers and funding opportunities, promote one's work, and recruit for clinical trials or labs. However, it cautions that one should avoid hypocrisy, mixing of personal and professional accounts, and going "hashtag crazy." The document also presents a model for open science publication that involves preregistering protocols, releasing preprints and data, publishing in open access journals, and sharing slides and information on Twitter.

1. Thinking about Twitter for Academics
Atul Butte, MD, PhD
Director, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, UCSF
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor
Chief Data Scientist, University of California Health (UC Health)
@atulbutte

3. • What do you want people to think about you?
• Are you trustworthy?
• Are you visionary?
• Are you dedicated?
• What are you looking at?
• What excites you?
• What are you working on?
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Branding

4. • Your papers brand you
• Your talks brand you
• Citations brand you
• Your university news brands you
• Twitter is a way for you to brand yourself
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Branding

5. • Great for directly hearing from the “heroes”
(and friends, foes, and frenemies, …)
• Finding relevant papers in your field
• Tweetorials and tweet “journal clubs”
• Finding funding opportunities
• What are the controversies in your field?
• Notes from meetings you can’t attend (#SGIM19 #ASHG2019)
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Reading from Twitter

6. • Promote your papers (add figures, pages)
– Drive eyes to drive up Altmetrics, citations
• Explain papers in more depth, with more context
• Put out positive news from you or your lab (flexing,
#humblebrag)
• Reach out directly to reporters
• Recruit using meeting hashtags (even if you’re not there!)
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Writing on Twitter

7. • Take seminar notes on Twitter, “live tweeting”
• Run your own Twitter journal club
• Add your hashtag in talks
• Recruit for clinical trials
• Good real news, to counter the fake news out there
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Writing on Twitter

8. • Tweets with stories are stronger
– Don’t feed hype
• Get your trainees into the story
• Caution mixing personal and career posts, personal accounts
• There is no edit
– Please #dont #go #hashtag #crazy
– Pictures help
• Humor is ok, but careful about whining (#firstworldproblems)
• Hypocrisy will be found and called out
– Be ready for trolls and jealous folks
• Twitter is only a means to an end, not an end in itself
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Caveats

9. • Plan the work
• Publish the protocol on protocols.io
• Tweet about it (to get real feedback)
• Do the work
• Publish the preprint at medRxiv or bioRxiv
• Tweet about it (softly)
• Release the data open-access (e.g. UC Dash datashare.ucsf.edu/stash) for
reproducibility
• Peer-review and publish the paper in an #openaccess journal
• (UCSF might write a story about it)
• Put the slides on slideshare.net
• Tweet about all of it
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The new publication model