It's time for scientists to tweet. Social media is no longer a new thing. But to scientists it still might be. There are few who are starting to take advantage of social media for professional reasons. What can other scientists learn from such use? What are the benefits and limitations? To investigate this, three colleagues and I looked at some concrete examples. From cradle to flight Here is what we found: Twitter can move conversations from the university lounge to a much larger network of scientists on social media.
Click to enlarge Scientists can also use Twitter to communicate far beyond the ivory tower of academia. Scientists can also tweet their research directly to decision makers. Several studies have shown that tweeting and blogging about scientific findings can increase their impact. Finally, social media can also provide a platform for critiques of published findings. Game-changer? There are, of course, limitations of social media in the scientific workflow. » The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment Journal of Digital Humanities. Melissa Terras In September 2011 I returned to work after a year on maternity leave. Many things needed sorting out, not least my digital presence at my home institution, which had switched to a content management system that seamlessly linked to University College London’s open-access repository, “Discovery.”
The idea was we should upload open-access versions of all our previously published research, and link to it from our home pages, to aid in dissemination. There is no doubt that this type of administrative task is tedious. To break up the monotony of digging out the last previous version prior to publication of my 26 journal papers (we put up a last-but-one copy to get around copyright issues with journals) I decided to blog the process. I wrote a post about each paper, or each research project that had spawned papers. More than 20,000 people have now read these three online posts. What Happens When You Tweet an Open-Access Paper I thought it worth revisiting the results of this. CrowdoMeter – or trying to understand tweets about journal papers. Last Friday Gunther Eysenbach published a very interesting paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR): Can Tweets Predict Citations?
Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact Gunther Eysenbach analyzed a total of 4208 tweets citing 286 distinct JMIR articles. 60% of the tweets were sent the day the paper was published, or the day after: Figure 3. Tweetation dynamics. There was a correlation between the number of tweets about a JMIR paper, and the number of citations in Google Scholar or Scopus (analyzed 17-29 months later). This is a great study because it shows empirically what many of us felt already: Twitter is one of the fastest tools to discover newly published scholarly papers, and the number of tweets is an important measure of scholarly impact. Are altmetrics only about counting citations? CrowdoMeter is doing a basic analysis of the crowdsourcing effort in real-time, allowing everyone to follow along: How Could Twitter Influence Science (And Why Scientists Are on Board)
How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. As Twitter users skyrocket, how are the science tweeps doing? Earlier today, David Bradley over at ScienceBase announced that his growing list of “Scientific Twitter Friends” has hit the 400 mark. Given the recent explosion in Twitter use, I was intrigued to see how these science-types are faring in the brave new world of on-line communication, 140 characters at a time.
This is a bubble chart of David’s science “tweeps,” courtesy of the Many Eyes website (click on the image to play with the original, or see the interactive version below) – the area of each bubble represents the number of users followers for a particular tweep… It’s not a particularly sophisticated analysis – number of followers is a very crude measure of success or impact on Twitter. But it does give an indication of where Twitter users with a science-bent stand. as you would expect, there are plenty of tweeps with modest followings – the mean number of followers is 528 from this particular analysis.
Notes: And here’s the interactive version of the bubble plot: Comment Twitter a changé la science. Souvenez-vous, c’était il y a six mois, fin novembre 2010. Wikileaks commençait à peine à diffuser ses 250.000 télégrammes diplomatiques. En Égypte, le Parti national démocratique de Hosni Moubarak s’apprêtait à gagner une fois de plus les élections haut la main. Et, durant quelques jours, nous fûmes nombreux à nous demander si la Nasa n’avait pas découvert des extraterrestres. Si vous avez oublié cette très brève rencontre du troisième type, c’est le moment idéal pour vous rafraîchir la mémoire.
Le 29 novembre, la Nasa annonçait qu’elle allait bientôt organiser une conférence de presse afin de «parler d’une découverte en astrobiologie influençant la recherche de preuves de vie extraterrestre». Les spéculations allèrent bon train —certains avancèrent même l’hypothèse que les scientifiques avaient découvert une trace de vie sur une des lunes de Saturne. publicité Déception Si c’est bien le cas, c’était une façon de penser appartenant au siècle dernier. Silence radio Réponses en ligne. Top 100 Scientists on Twitter. March 13th, 2012 While scientists may have a reputation for being anti-social, when it comes to using social media you’ll find the best and brightest in diverse scientific fields taking full advantage of the chance to connect with laymen and other scientists alike.
Twitter is full of opportunities to hear what these scientists have to say, follow their work, and even start a conversation. Here, we’ve collected 100 amazing scientists that use Twitter (listed by category, not ranking) that provide perfect reading material for anyone hoping to learn more about a field or just keep up with the latest in research and writing on some seriously interesting topics. Extraplanetary Sciences From astronomy to rocket science, these scientists are dedicating their careers to exploring what lies beyond our own planet. @SethShostak: Astronomer Seth Shostak offers up insights into the cosmos through great links to space news in this feed.
Biology Chemistry Earth Sciences Environmental Science Physics Technology.