Methods for Sharing Research Findings Across Fields

Communicating your results to practice (or getting outside of your typical academic process). While serving as a mentor in a workshop, a Ph.D. student asked one of the best questions I've heard in a while. Rather than asking, "How do I publish in a top journal?" They asked, "What is the best way to communicate my results to practice?" The question caused me to pause. I offered a bit of a glib answer. But, it left me thinking "What strategies can an early career researcher employ to share their work with practice?" As loathe as I am to suggest posting about your work, I encourage early career scholars to learn how to talk about their work online. Here is how I would go about it doing it. First. Engage offline. Attend meetings of practitioners and listen. Attend workshops. Meet-ups. and more. Make friends. Learn the issues they are concerned with. Learn the language they use. Second. Share. Share your work with practice. Take some time to share what you study with your new practitioner friends informally or formally. If you luck out, you can give a short presentation of your work to an applied audience. Third. Evaluate. Ask practice for feedback on a) your problem, b) your question, and c) your findings. See Roseman and Vessey's work on applicability checks for guidance (https://lnkd.in/dh9WtMdm) or one of the 563 papers that cite them for Fourth. Learn. If your contacts in practice find value in what you've done, consider taking your work online in more than a humble brag. Join the conversation on LinkedIn, Reddit, or other places in practice and learn the themes and language used in relevant conversations. Fifth. Establish. Establish an account. Post to it periodically relevant information. Comment from that account. Establish credibility. Focus on your topic of choice. Do not pollute the channel with too many off-topic posts. Sixth. Engage online. Weave your work into the conversation. Weave more than I published a paper into the conversation. Focus on either a) short bites of what you've done or b) crafting a longer blog post or newsletter on the topic. Seventh. Persist. If you want to be part of a space, you must be more than an occasional tourist. Post on the topic consistently. Post about your work. Post about other people's work - positive, negative, and neutral. Become an educated, judicious content creator. Most of all, it will take time if you choose to go down this path and do more than rely on your university to promote your work. It can take months and years to reach a broad audience. But. If you post content in the language of your audience, you will find the connection to practice that you seek! Best of luck!

Communication between science and IT teams is hampered by technical jargon. An effective strategy to facilitate alignment is to define a boundary of understanding and the sphere of what one cares to control. In a simplified view, imagine a line with IT and science at the opposite ends. The boundary of understanding is the middle point where the teams meet. This is as far as IT can comfortably understand the science and vice versa. When communicating to a partner team, details beyond their boundary of understanding should be abstracted away. You may encounter teams that have true or perceived understanding of another’s area of expertise. The question to pose is - “What is important for you to control? Why?”. Defining the sphere of control gives teams authority to move fast. Avoid unnecessary negotiations. If you are a science team, think of all computational work as software operating on data in a sequence of steps. The scientific questions need to be abstracted away. Think tools, files, speed and costs. Meet your IT team at their boundary of understanding. For IT teams, ask about software, process, user experience, performance and cost. Here is a made up research project - “We use FancyTool for protein folding to understand structural implications of genomic variants of the ABC3 gene identified by NGS implicated in disease X”. Interesting but hard to comprehend for all teams. Let’s restate the same in terms that both teams understand and care about - “We generate data at the lab. Output is in FASTA format up to 100GB per experiment. Data are processed with a community pipeline from nf-core. We manually inspect each step on our laptops. The pipeline must complete in < 12 hrs. We will submit each file to FancyTool using Jupyter Notebooks. We use StructureViewer to examine the output on our laptops. FancyTool must be always available and we want to get the fastest possible turnaround. Cost is not an issue“. Now that is a great starting point! #cloud #research #computationalbiology #IT #collaboration #science

In academia, we often publish groundbreaking research that remains confined to journals—what if a few extra steps could amplify its impact and visibility? It's very common to generate valuable datasets, maps, and models, publishing our findings in peer-reviewed journals. However, these contributions often remain within the academic community. By taking additional steps—such as creating interactive visualizations and sharing them publicly—we can significantly increase the reach and impact of our research. This realization led me to develop two interactive tools based on the study "Integrated Socio-environmental Vulnerability Assessment of Coastal Hazards Using Data-driven and Multi-criteria Analysis Approaches" by a colleague of mine Ahad Hasan Tanim, published in Nature, Scientific Reports. Coastal Vulnerability Index StoryMap: https://lnkd.in/dTCrmgrq An interactive narrative that visualizes the study's findings, allowing users to explore various vulnerability categories across the region. Coastal Vulnerability Dashboard: https://lnkd.in/dJ7p24zA A dynamic dashboard that provides in-depth analysis and visualization of the coastal vulnerability data, facilitating informed decision-making. These projects were initially a way for me to apply and reinforce the skills I acquired from an ESRI course earlier this year. However, they also serve a deeper purpose: to enhance the visibility and impact of our academic work. Research indicates that sharing data and visualizations can lead to higher citation rates and broader dissemination of findings. Moreover, open access to research outputs fosters greater transparency and collaboration, accelerating scientific progress. I hope these tools inspire fellow researchers to consider how we can make our work more accessible and impactful. A few extra steps can transform our research from a published paper into a resource that benefits a wider audience. #CoastalResilience #OpenScience #DataVisualization #GIS #AcademicImpact #ClimateChange #PublicEngagement #visualization #dataViz #GISvisualization #vulnerabilityMap #coastalVulnerability #interactiveMap #ModernGIS