10 Simple Steps to Instagram Your Research Paper

It is absolutely ridiculous that in 2020 we are still spreading scientific knowledge in the same format we used in 1665.

Times have changed, and the way we consume information has changed radically in the last 30 years. Yet, we still send our scientific studies as long dry two-column walls of text into the world.

Now, I know there are academic venues—especially in my world of computing research—that require authors to submit a 30 second video with their publication and have made some other attempts at communicating this knowledge. But most of the authors, even in my community, stop with these papers and the 20 minute talk—I’ll address the problems with these talks in a future post.

Back to the papers, who’s excited to read them? I have to read those papers to make a living—if you can call a Ph.D. stipend a living—and I still HATE reading them.

So, let me show you how I turned one of my papers into an Instagram post!

If you think it is impossible to turn an entire academic research paper into an Instagram post, then the answer is quite simply yes. However, you can take a piece of a paper—one research question—and put into an easily digestible post.

Let me walk you through what I did, and how you can replicate this yourself—after all I am a scientist!

Step 1. Your ‘cover’ image.

Start with an enticing phrase to capture the “scroller’s” attention. Hook them in with an intriguing question so they want to swipe to the next image.

Look at your favorite magazine cover for inspiration: WIRED, Forbes, Inc, GQ—for me personally.

Here’s what I did:

Title: Design with the World

Research Question: How to include anyone in the world in your user study?

Step 2. The first piece of your paper: Motivation.

What problem(s) are you trying to solve?

What is the motivation behind your work?

The problem I am solving is: The number and diversity of participants in in-lab user studies is often limited.

Step 3. What did you do?

Step 4. ‘try to’ show don’t tell

What did you do to address what is wrong with the world?

Did you run an empirical study? Invent a device or a piece of software? Did you formulate a new method?

Can you show your work?

This works great with artifact contributions. Screenshots of your software. A video of your device in action. Even a flowchart of your method works, as long as you can clearly capture it in a single frame.

I created an online platform that enables researchers to run user studies in a distributed fashion.

Step 5. Show your results.

What’s the highlight result of your work?

Specific to the research question in this post.

Here, I am showing my most impressive result as it relates to my research question: By stepping out of the lab and running distributed user studies, I was able to triple the number of participants and halve my run time.

Step 6. Add a punchline. If you can.

Can you add a punchline to drive your point home?

I love this quote from my favorite participant — P016!

P016 gave me a great soundbite!

Step 7. What are you contributing to the world?

How is the world a better place now because of your work?

In other words, what does your paper contribute?

To quote my own post, “Crowdlicit showed us that we can reach out from the lab and reach participants all over the world efficiently.”

Step 8. Who are you?

Let people know who worked their butt off making this happen!

Nothing wrong with a bit of self-promotion.

Hi! I’m Abdullah. Thanks for reading this. ;)

Step 9. CTA!

You want people to try your invention? Follow your design recommendation? READ YOUR PAPER? Or just follow you because you’ll keep pumping out awesome science-y content?

ASK THEM TO DO IT!

My ask: follow my accounts and share this post to spread the scientific knowledge!

Add a CTA — Call To Action!

Step 10. Cite your sources.

Finally, Never forget to cite the giants on whose shoulders you’re standing.

So if you’re creating a post just like this one, don’t forget to cite me! (IG/theaxali)

Speaking of which, I structured the major pieces of how to create a post like this one—Steps 2,3,5, and 7—on the 5-point introduction structure found here.

You can simply provide a citation to the subject article of your post!

And there you have it! You can turn any boring research paper into a series of awesome-looking Instagram posts. Put your research out there and you never know who you might inspire to become tomorrow’s scientist.