Guest Post: #phdchat—a Resource for Researchers

 [This post is from Caroline Cage, who recently provided a guest post about following people and institutions on Twitter. You can follow Caroline @C_J_Cage. Thanks, Caroline!  —Barbara]

Hashtags (#s) signify groups of Twitter posts (tweets). In this blog post I’ll discuss #phdchat, a useful resource for researchers. There are such groups for many interests and disciplines.

I was lucky to discover #phdchat in my first year of research. It was a welcoming and supportive community to connect to, with lots of advice from researchers at different stages in their careers.

#phdchat includes frequent posts about writing advice or the PhD process. There also are questions and comments. And there is support for researchers going through difficult times!

In addition, there is a regular discussion where users vote on a topic on which they would like to share their questions and advice. Although #phdchat is based in the United Kingdom, most of the content is relevant to researchers everywhere.

To find #phdchat, you can search for it using the Twitter search bar. When you do so, you should see a Twitter feed (or list of posts) all showing #phdchat in the messages posted. You can read the posts and click on links to access articles.

To contribute to the group, just write a post and include #phdchat at the end. Here is a sample tweet: “Tears or not, it's an amazing journey with some great tweeps #phdchat”. [Note: “Tweeps” are Twitter users.]

Tip: A useful way to view multiple Twitter feeds (such as #phdchat) is through TweetDeck. You can download this application from the Internet.