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\begin{document}

\title{I accidentally a social scientist}


\author[ ]{bgreshake}
\author[ ]{vollefolklore}
\author[ ]{Authorea Reddit}

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\emph{Social} is probably the last word that people who know me well (Hi
Mom!) would use to describe me. But being
\href{http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/generation-what}{one of
those pesky \emph{millenials}}, I was born too late to ever get to know
the (academic) Dark Ages intimately, i.e.~the pre-internet past. That,
and my abysmal high school diploma, which made sure that no university
would accept me for studies in the two years after finishing school --
afforded me lots of spare time for
\href{https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/aug/05/im-a-serious-academic-not-a-professional-instagrammer}{\emph{professional
social networking/instagramming}}, or \emph{blogging} as it was called
then. So I came, somewhat naturally, from blogging about my daily
routines to writing about my adventures in the lab, studying and doing
science.

At some point in \textasciitilde{}2008 this developed into the idea of
doing a joint science blog with
\href{https://www.twitter.com/PhilippBayer}{Philipp}, then my fellow
student of biology, now my co-conspirator on \emph{openSNP}. Being good
students we came up with the blog's title, \emph{Beerology}, after a
couple of those I assume (nope, the pun doesn't really work better in
German). Writing about our studies, the latest scientific papers we had
read and about the political changes in European Academia not only
helped in learning about other perspectives through comments, but also
in more tangible scientific experiences. Besides regularly meeting up
with other blogging scientists, it also helped in getting around a bit,
like like my trip to the \emph{Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings} in 2010.
Many of the friendships formed on these trips are good and lasting. In
the best case allowing me to Erd\selectlanguage{polish}ő\selectlanguage{english}s-esk crash on couches around the
globe, re-visiting friends wherever the academic life brings me to.

This already means the world if you've been on the
research-travel-circuit for long enough. However, it probably won't
convince everyone of the benefits of social media. Especially not if
you're dealing with people who for example complain about things like
\emph{professional instagramming}. So let's instead turn to the metrics
that scientists care about: getting publications out. According to
Google Scholar
\href{https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=en\&user=xmtDOnQAAAAJ\&view_op=list_works\&sortby=pubdate}{I've
(co-)published 12 manuscripts since 2012}. Why is this relevant in the
context of discussing the benefits of Social Media for your research?
Well, just looking through these I find that \textbf{over 40\% of my
publications were only ever written in that form thanks to social
media}. My Master's degree in Ecology \& Evolution nicely explains my
work on plants/fungi/fish/rabbit poop (yes, that's a thing). But my work
on bioethics and personal genomics is not a natural fit to my
professional education, to say the least. And this is because those were
developed completely independently, to a good extent even while I was
still finishing up said degree.

First, there are the two publications on
\href{https://f1000research.com/articles/1-3}{family-wide personal
genomics} and
\href{https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-015-1973-7}{crowdsourced
personal genomics}. These go back to Philipp and me finding the work by
@\href{https://www.twitter.com/manuelcorpas}{manuelcorpas} on these
topics more or less accidentally on Twitter \& Reddit. Some tweets \&
emails back-and-forth later I was not only sitting on a plane to the UK
to meet in person \& discuss how to improve our project \emph{openSNP},
but it also led to two very cool papers, with
\href{https://manuelcorpas.com/2016/04/11/article-crowdsourced-analysis-of-family-genome-among-bmc-genomics-most-influential-articles-for-2015/}{one
of them even being the second-most influential paper in that journal for
that year}. In a similar way the collaborations with
@\href{http://www.twitter.com/EffyVayena}{EffyVayena} go
\href{https://twitter.com/gedankenstuecke/status/311609020064624640}{back
to Twitter as far as I can tell}. Besides
\href{http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2015/03/30/medethics-2015-102663.full?view=full\&uritype=cgi}{working
on participant-led research}, we also did a large survey amongst the
users of \emph{openSNP}, collecting very useful data on our cohort,
which is being analyzed and written up right now.

It's hard to overstate how useful these connections have been and still
are, especially given that I was still early in my career at the time of
embarking on those collaborations. Usually you don't easily get the
opportunity to form international collaborations as a Master's student.
But thanks to social media you might as well, especially if you want to
connect with people outside your own narrow research field. Because if
it was not for social media, I probably would not have been doing some
social science.

So the \textbf{tl;dr} is: \textbf{Social media isn't only great to find
people to talk science to, but also to find people with whom you can
actually do science}.

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