More specifically the guide is being offered by the London School of Economics (LSE) Public Policy Group and it’s called, Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities (pdf). From the Feb. 22, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Thousands of academics and researchers at all levels of experience and across all disciplines already use Twitter daily, alongside more than 200 million other users.

Yet how can such a brief medium have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

This guide answers these questions, showing you how to get started on Twitter and showing you how Twitter can be used as a resource for research, teaching and impact activities.

Here’s a sample of some of the advice offered in the 12 pp. guide,

A Twitter operation can add extra value to almost any research project in several ways.

Tweet about each new publication, website update or new blog that the project completes. To gauge feedback, you could send a tweet that links to your research blog and ask your followers for their feedback and comments.

For tweeting to work well, always make sure that an open-web full version or summary of every publication, conference presentation or talk at an event is available online. Summarize every article published in closed-web journal on a blog, or lodge an extended summary on your university’s online research depository. In addition, sites like www.scribd.com are useful for depositing open web versions.

Tweet about new developments of interest from the project’s point of view, for instance, relevant government policy changes, think tank reports, or journal articles.

Use hashtags (#) to make your materials more visible – e.g. #phdchat. Don’t be afraid to start your own.

Use your tweets to cover developments at other related research sites, retweeting interesting new material that they produce. This may appear to some as ‘helping the competition’, but in most research areas the key problem is to get more attention for the area as a whole. Building up a Twitter network of reciprocating research projects can help everyone to keep up to date more easily, improve the standard and pace of debate, and so attract more attention (and funding) into the research area.

Twitter provides many opportunities for ‘crowd sourcing’ research activities across the sciences, social sciences, history and literature – by getting people to help with gathering information, making observations, undertaking data analysis, transcribing and editing documents – all done just for the love of it. Some researchers have also used Twitter to help ‘crowdsource’ research funding from interested public bodies. You can read more about crowdsourcing at the LSE Impact blog. (p. 8)

For anyone who doesn’t already have an account, it’s pretty easy to set one up at Twitter.com. Once you’re set up, you can follow Nanowerk by going here: http://twitter.com/nanowerk and/or you can follow me at http://twitter.com/frogheart.