Problem Description

Research institutions increasingly rely on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate to communicate their findings to both academic and public audiences. Effective research communication through these channels is essential for demonstrating societal impact, attracting collaborators, and engaging with diverse stakeholder groups.

However, monitoring and analysing the reach and impact of these communication activities across multiple platforms remains a significant challenge. Each platform provides its own analytics interface with different metrics, time ranges, and export capabilities. This fragmentation makes it difficult to build a holistic picture of how research communication performs over time, which content formats resonate with different audiences, and where strategic adjustments should be made.

The challenge is further compounded by the heterogeneous data access landscape across these platforms. While some platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube) offer official APIs for retrieving analytics data, others present significant barriers. ResearchGate does not provide a public API and prohibits automated data collection in its terms of service, meaning analytics data (such as reads, citations, and profile views) must be entered manually. Similarly, Google Scholar does not offer an official API; while open-source libraries exist for extracting citation data, these are unofficial workarounds subject to rate limiting and potential breakage.

Currently, there is no unified tool or dashboard tailored to the specific needs of academic research groups that addresses this mixed-access landscape – aggregating automated API data alongside manually entered metrics – and presents actionable insights for improving research dissemination strategies. Existing commercial social media management tools (e.g., Hootsuite, Sprout Social) are designed for marketing departments and corporate use cases, and lack features relevant to academic contexts such as tracking publication-linked engagement, monitoring citation metrics, or integrating academic platform data.

Research Question

How can a cross-platform research impact and outreach analytics dashboard be designed to effectively support research groups in monitoring, analysing, and improving the reach and impact of their research communication activities across platforms with heterogeneous data access capabilities?

Goal of Thesis

The goal of this thesis is twofold. First, the student will conduct a structured analysis of existing approaches, tools, and metrics for social media analytics in the context of research communication. This includes a review of relevant literature on science communication, social media analytics, and dashboard design, as well as an analysis of the specific requirements of academic research groups.

Second, the student will design and implement a functional prototype of a cross-platform analytics dashboard. The dashboard should integrate automated data collection from platforms with official API support (LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube) alongside intuitive manual data entry interfaces for platforms without API access (ResearchGate, Google Scholar). The tool should provide meaningful visualisations and summaries that enable research group members to:

• Track key engagement metrics (e.g., impressions, reach, followers, interactions, citations) across platforms over time
• Compare the performance of different content types and formats across platforms
• Identify trends, high-performing content, and areas for strategic improvement in research communication
• Efficiently enter and manage data from platforms without API access through a well-designed manual input workflow

The prototype should be evaluated with members of the research group to validate its usefulness and usability, and the thesis should conclude with design recommendations for future development.