Heather Doran

Image from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dirkb86/8444929253/ This January I visited London for an interview. I was feeling nervous and excited and, as I usually handle challenging situations, I tweeted about it. People on twitter offered words of encouragement and support. Some of the people that tweeted I have met and know well, others I only know through twitter (and I don't even know their real name). With all of these people I have built relationships completely online and we have shared advice, interesting news stories and silly memes. The tweeting helped, I found at the end of February that I was successful. The twitter conversations I had just before the interview helped me get through the interview, and reinforced my feelings about why I was there. The interview was for a project focusing on how science is shared via social media with the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust . The project is a Travel Fellowship and I'm going to be meeting with people across the US

This is a series of review posts focusing on apps and tools which may help people navigate the digital landscape and the masses of information out there. I focus on tools which might help academics and those that work with research, especially those that will save people time. This post lists more tools and tricks.  Buffer  sells itself as 'Social Media Management' application and that is pretty self explanatory about what it does. You can schedule posts, post from multiple accounts simultaneously and generate statistics such as the number of clicks on a link and audience size, allowing you to refine you content, post at the best times and generally be better and more active on social media with minimal effort. I am finding Buffer incredibly useful and enjoyable to use. It was really simple to integrate it into my posting and social media use and has allowed me to better manage my posting schedule and saved me lots of time. I've been using Buffer for just over

Science is an extremely competitive field, getting research funding requires an excellent track record and researchers judge themselves against their peers. I wrote a blog post about the number of publications scientists are 'supposed' to have per year in order to be competitive on fellowships and grant applications a few years ago. I am surprised at the number of people that find that post by  searching for 'How many research papers should I have?'  . It's a worry or thought most researchers have throughout their careers. There is of course no magic number and there's a need for a track record of quality publications vs a quantity of publications. The ultimate accolade for a scientist is being awarded a Nobel Prize and I came across an interesting infographic about the age of Nobel Prize winners (when they completed their prize winning work) and also how that relates to the age at which they wrote their PhD dissertation. I have included it at the bottom of t

Looking to share your research project online via a blog or social media but not sure where to start? I often get asked how you blog. So here's a post with some hints, tips and how to get started with a blog. I think blogging can be an extremely useful tool but it isn't for everyone, it is hard work and can be extremely difficult to do well. There are also risks involved and it usually isn't the best way of engaging with the public. Researchers can blog for a number of reasons . It could be to share work with a wider audience or to share it with peers and there's plenty of folk (myself included) that blog about working as a researcher in a general sense. These posts are mostly read by other researchers. I found blogging through my PhD quite therapeutic and it helped me make a few new friends along the way. I've included lots of links in this post to resources elsewhere on the web. I'm definitely not the first person to post about blogging so I hav