Promotional Resources

The SPARC program encourages the scientific community to use the materials below to promote the SPARC ecosystem of information and data resources being developed within the NIH Common Fund program. Find sections below on the usage of the logo, citations, twitter, colors, and QR codes. Please refer to the terms of service.

About SPARC

The NIH Common Fund’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program supports a consortium of international researchers working to accelerate development of therapeutic devices and identification of neural targets for bioelectronic medicine -- modulating electrical activity in nerves to help treat diseases and conditions by precisely adjusting organ function. By visiting the SPARC Portal, the research community can access freely available high value datasets, maps, and computational studies with the potential to help transform our understanding of nerve-organ interactions and advance bioelectronic medicine towards treatments that change lives.

SPARC Logo

This vector graphics file (.svg) has a transparent background, and can be resized to the dimensions that best serve your needs. Because of size, we have placed it at the bottom of this page SVG logo.

Citations

As with any research product, all SPARC publications, datasets and resources should be appropriately cited.

SPARC Grant Support: If you were funded by SPARC, SPARC publications and presentations should acknowledge funding through the NIH Common Fund and cite all appropriate grant numbers, for example: “This research is supported by the NIH Common Fund’s SPARC program under awards X, Y, Z”

SPARC Datasets: entire datasets or specific components of datasets.
To promote reproducibility and give credit to SPARC investigators who publish their data, we recommend the following practices for citing a SPARC dataset. To make it easy, the SPARC Portal provides the full data citation, including the option of different formats, under the About tab of each dataset landing page.

SPARC Portal resources: using the integrated resources on the portal (e.g., flatmap).
Authors of software or the project that developed the software, Tool name:Subtitle, Version number (if available), [Software]. Publisher/Archive Name. Retrieved Month dd, yyyy, from URL. An additional resource on how to cite software is located here: Citing SPARC Datasets in Manuscripts.

Example
SPARC, SPARC Flatmap:Rat, [Software]. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://sparc.science/maps

Colors

If you would like to reflect the SPARC Portal colors, use the following values:

Purple
HEX: #8300BF
RBG: 131-0-191
CMYK:

Light Purple
HEX: #BC00FC
RBG:188-0-252

Dark Blue
HEX: #24245B
RGB: 36-36-91

Blue
HEX: #0026FF
RBG: 0-38-255

QR Codes

QR codes are especially useful for any print material (like posters and flyers) because these codes can be easily scanned by smartphones. Select the quick code below that best serves your purpose.

This QR code will resolve to the Sparc.science portal website:

This QR Code will resolve to the NIH Common Fund SPARC program website:

Twitter

What is this?

A guide to help you connect with your SPARC colleagues and the wider #ScienceTwitter community.

Why should I use it?

To promote SPARC projects in the form of:

• Published articles
• Upcoming seminars
• SPARC datasets
• Posters, talks, sessions, or events and scientific conferences
• Awards or new funding

To network:

• By following other SPARC researchers
• By tracking relevant hashtags
• By starting conversations around projects being shared

How should I make use of this?

• First, follow our account @sparc_science, and include this handle in your tweets so we’re notified of your posts.
• Use relevant hashtags:
  • At meetings you can use official ones such as #ExpBio, then tie into SPARC using #sparcAtExpBio
  • Use popular general science hashtags such as #MicroscopyMonday #TechTuesday, and #FluorescenceFriday

Composing tweets

• Use your 280 characters well - use emojis, hashtags and tag accounts, but add sparingly

• When adding hashtags use Camel Case or Upper Camel Case to make them more accessible and easier to read. So instead of #iloveneuroscience use #iLoveNeuroscience

• Write in clear language that is easy to read and mentions the key points, e.g., if you’re tweeting about presenting a poster, include the:

  • Title or theme
  • Poster number
  • Date and time you are presenting

• Make your tweets stand out! People are more likely to notice them if you add more than just block text, for example add some emojis, images, videos or gifs

• If you have a story to tell that would require more than one tweet, you can “thread” them together. You can do this by clicking the (+) symbol to the left of the Tweet button and a new box will appear.

• You can also “quote tweet” someone else’s message with commentary on why you’re interested.

Adding media

A good way to make tweets more eye-catching is to include images, gifs, or videos. As with hashtags, you can make images and gifs more accessible by including alt text for anyone who uses a screen reader with Twitter

Keeping track of tweets and accounts

Twitter by its very nature is a very fast moving platform; however, there are a few ways to keep tabs on something you read once, somewhere.

• Following a hashtag - you can either search for a specific hashtag, or you can click on it in a tweet to bring them all up in a timeline.

• In the menu bar you can also toggle between the “Top” hits for the most popular tweets and the “Latest” tweets to read them in chronological order.

• If you want to come back to something to check or look at in more depth later, you can also bookmark tweets. Click the share button at the bottom right of the tweet and you’ll see an option to bookmark it.

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