Scholarly articles are not the only ways that academics communicate their research, nor are they even the main way in many academic fields. This is partly because many of us do not have experience communicating research using methods outside of academic writing.
Consider, for instance, your present experience:
- Creating posters, slides, and data visualizations
- Lecturing or teaching students about research
- Speaking about research to non-academic or mixed expertise audiences
- Being interviewed or answering questions about research
- Writing blog posts or non-academic articles about research
- Posting to social media about research
As a graduate student, you should challenge yourself to start practicing broader forms of scholarly communication. Some ideas include:
- Participate in conferences or local networking events
- Submit poster or presentation proposals to student-focused research events
- The UW Libraries’ Research Commons regularly offers programming aimed at grad student research communication, including Scholar’s Studio
- Search for researchers, experts, and fellow grad students on Twitter.
- Search on conference hashtags for a social media snapshot of an event.
More Resources for Communicating Research
- Digital Scholarship Presentation and Publication Resources, UW Libraries
- How to Effectively Present Science and Scientific Research to a Broad Audience, Purdue University
- Public Critical Race Scholarship from the UW Graduate School
Text on the UW Libraries web pages are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0), except where otherwise noted. Images and video are not included.