Post by Dawid Hanak

The first time I posted about one of my own papers on LinkedIn, it got 41 views. I copied the abstract. Pasted the journal name. Wrote "delighted to share our latest work." Pressed post. Then I refreshed the page for two days waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. I decided LinkedIn wasn't for serious academics. I was wrong. The problem wasn't the algorithm, and it wasn't that I'm bad at self-promotion. The problem was that I posted the paper instead of the point. Your abstract is the most complex paragraph in your whole paper. It's written to survive peer review. It's the worst possible thing to lead with on a feed someone is thumbing through between meetings. Here's what I do now instead. Four moves: 1. Pick ONE reader: not "a general audience," nobody is general. A policymaker. A clinician. Your smartest friend from another department. Then write the one sentence that person would repeat to someone else. 2. Lead with the problem, not the announcement. The paper is the answer. Give them the question first. The journal link goes at the bottom. 3. Show the messy middle. The assumption you had to drop. The method that failed three times. The result that surprised you. That's the human part and it's the part your training deleted from the paper. 4. End with a door, not a full stop. A real question you actually want answered. The comments are where the reach is, and where the unexpected email from someone in another field starts. I built an audience of ~60,000 doing versions of this while holding a full-time research load. Not because any single post went viral. Because I stopped announcing and started translating. One honest caveat: this grows how many people READ your work. Whether it grows citations is genuinely debated (the data there is mixed). So do it to be read. That's reason enough. What's the one sentence a stranger would repeat about your last paper? Try writing it in the comments. I'll tell you if it still smells like an abstract. #AcademicChatter #PhDLife #ResearchImpact #ScienceCommunication #EarlyCareerResearchers