Are you a scientist on Twitter? Well, there is a secret Twitter tool that only a select few know: lists. It’s a bit surprising that they are so little used, because they are among the most useful features that Twitter has to offer.

What does a list do? With lists, you can group together in one place all of the Twitter accounts that connect to any possible topic. So, for example, you could have one list for the journals that are most important to you, another list for key researchers in your field, and so on.

All of this might seem rather abstract, so let’s go with an example. The astrophysicist Kate Mack (@astrokatie on Twitter) has created her own list of women in physics, astronomy, and related areas. Below you can see a few of their combined tweets in the list:

You can create lists very quickly and, with them, you can really efficiently keep your finger on the pulse of every subject that you care about on Twitter.

Interested in learning more about creating Twitter lists? SciFund Challenge has a lot more to say about it in our Twitter for Scientists class. Here’s the relevant section of the class material.