Even with the very simple technique of tagging papers, we can facilitate enhanced collaboration among scholars and public sharing of scholarship — and when those two goals are met together, it is to the benefit of both.

When you submit a paper to SocArXiv, you have the opportunity to add tags. (You can also do this after your paper is posted, by going back to Edit Paper.) Those tags are then easily searchable for you or others. For example if you go to socarxiv.org and type:

tags:("covid-19")

into the search bar, you get this page, with the clunky URL:

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/discover?q=tags%3A(%22covid-19%22)

which lists the 600+ papers that have used the COVID-19 tag. (Unfortunately, the tags aren’t clickable links on SocArXiv paper pages, but you can search for them.)

Scholarship communities

This simple tagging tool allows for relatively spontaneous grouping of scholarship, as when someone says, “We need to organize the recent work on police violence,” and people start uploading and tagging their work. But it just as well facilitates more organized efforts. Just as such groupings use Twitter hashtags to pull people together, we can do the same thing with scholarship using SocArXiv. Groups that might benefit from this tool include:

• Working groups on a research topic
• Panels for an upcoming conference
• Departments or groups within departments
• Sections of a professional association
• Scholar-activist groups

Any such group can simply share the instructions above and notify participants of the associated tag. For example, if you are organizing a workshop or conference, you can make the meeting more productive by encouraging people to post their papers in advance, and use a common tag, such as “CairoMeeting2023,” or even “CairoMeeting2023-session-12”. Then you can share the URL for the search on that tag as in your preparatory materials or program.

We’re happy to help get you off the ground with your collaborative work. Feel free to contact us.