Email, blogs, interviews, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter and conferences are only a few of the many ways scientists communicate with each other, with institutions, journalists and the media, and the public. The ease of use and free access to social media mean that information can spread rapidly and to a massive audience. I discuss how social media and networking can be employed to your advantage and some possible traps to avoid.
Think for just a minute from where we have come. In 1990—only about 30 years ago—email was just emerging. For most scientists, communication was principally in person, through letters and by telephone. You would never send a tweet-like message via snail mail, nor call someone on the phone every time you read an interesting paper. In 1990 and indeed until the Internet explosion, communication took more time and effort—we had to think harder about what was useful and important.
Things have clearly changed.
Social media allows virtually instant access to most any kind of information of interest (and not of interest), and enables you to share news, that of others, give your opinion, or engage in active dialogue in a matter of seconds or minutes (1). Not only is social media easily accessible and user-friendly, but most of what you can—or would ever want to—do can be done with a handful of tools and interfaces: the Internet, cell phones, personal websites, blogs, social networks, emails and text messages.
Social media can also be abused. With a simple spoken phrase or drag of the cursor you can ricochet back and forth between actual work and the latest research news. Concentration is easily broken each time you receive an SMS, have the urge to see what others are talking about on Twitter or just feel like checking whether there’s any new email in your inbox.
Being connected opens new doors, but also poses formidable challenges.
Social Media Puts You in Touch
Social media is the universe of dedicated servers and personal blogs that permit channels of communication—or rather—the flow of information. Social media continues to diversify and includes social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, microblogging, wikis, and media and data sharing (2).
Until the Internet age, science was mostly communicated through the reading and citation of published articles and attending and giving research seminars. Tens or hundreds of people may have read a published article or attended a talk, but most of them were probably not venturing very far from their own areas of research.
The Internet and social media have radically changed this. Rather than being limited to a bounded group, the number of potentially connected people on the Internet is virtually limitless. This is not to say that 1 million people will ever be interested in any of my publications! However, this number could conceivably be 1000 or more, whereas without the Internet it would have been 10 or perhaps 100.
Consider the following illustration.
I have published an exciting paper and hope that it will be noticed in the scientific community. The usual channels for this are database searches, citation in other publications, or when I present the paper at conferences or invited seminars. With social media—take for example Twitter—all I have to do is tweet a message announcing the paper. The more followers I have, the more my message will be seen and the more people will actually look at my paper. But because some of my followers believe it is important to “spread the word,” they, in turn, retweet my message—possibly with their own recommendation in the form of a brief comment—to their followers. And so on. . .
Large numbers of followers and the chance effect of one retweeter being a “super-spreader”—that is, having thousands or more followers—can mean that retweets of my original message grow exponentially. In a matter of minutes, hundreds or thousands of people may see my article. This is not to say that many of them are interested scientists, but nevertheless some will be (3).
Some Pros, Some Cons
Social media interfaces provide a world of possibilities (4). Again, take Twitter. Within minutes a scientist can do one or more of: tweet one’s own messages, retweet the messages of others, enter into a discussion thread and obtain information from a range of sources, including individuals, academic departments, research teams, journals, etc. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are particularly useful in engaging interactions among scientists, stakeholders and the public (5). More sophisticated and complete webinars and podcasts are ways to share your own work, and learn about that of others (6).
Social collaboration networks connect academics with common interests. These range from professional networks such as LinkedIn, which advertises your CV, accomplishments and has a live news feed, to more scholar-tailored networks such as ResearchGate in the basic sciences, Academia.edu in the social sciences and humanities, and most recently the non-profit ScholarlyHub. These platforms allow the posting of papers and promote connections (7).
But the mind-boggling variety of possibilities in social media highlights what are perhaps its four main drawbacks and limitations: information overflow, user addiction, and questionable authority and impact.
Information overflow. Knowing which sources to follow, what posts to read and which to give weight to is as much an art as a science. If you are on Twitter, and follow 100 people, journals and news media, then you are probably receiving hundreds of tweets each day. Beyond the problem of scrolling through this information and deciding what to read, there is the issue of finding too much of interest. Similar to doing a literature review, a huge number of social media entries may appear to be essential reads. Learning how to be selective is part of how one more generally deals with information overflow.
User addiction. Arguably, the main challenge for those who use social media is to know when to start and when to stop. Some actively seek media as a pleasurable and useful outlet for learning about and communicating research. Others use it more passively as an easy, quick and entertaining refuge from work. The use of social media—be it on a telephone or computer screen—is largely a private affair between you and your device. This means that only you can stop media from becoming a time sink.
Authority. Social media potentially puts scientists into touch with orders-of-magnitude more people than they’ve ever actually met and sources than they would have otherwise consulted. This presents the serious issue of receiving what may appear to be factual information, but really can be anything from intelligent guesses to the persuasive phrasing of total nonsense. Unfortunately, the interest, importance and authority of a source cannot be assessed simply based on the number of likes or retweets it receives, since many viewers mechanically approve what others already have, creating a snowballing effect—the tweet goes “viral.” Accurate filtering for authority is next-to-impossible, since even “trusted” sources may relay dubious information. The more vigilant learn how to spot this, whereas the less vigilant risk not only giving credence to unmeritorious information, but also spreading it to others.
Impact. Although certain measures of article influence such as PageRank and the Eigenfactor are correlated with journal impact (8), there is mixed evidence that employing social media is similarly associated at the article level (9).
Blogs
Blogs developed as extensions of websites. As users realized the opportunities provided by blogging, dedicated sites grew exponentially. Now anyone can easily create her own blog via a developer. Blogs provide a forum for talking about most anything that pleases the blogger, such as particular scientific themes or the interface between science and society or policy. Blogs can be written for anything from specialized audiences to the general public.
Regular blogs may garner a dedicated following of hundreds or more. They can therefore serve to promote one’s own research (or research agenda) in a more user-friendly way than technical papers. Blogs need not be dedicated websites: many scientists use other social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a microblogging platform. Some blogs are one-way, that is the blogger publishes essays with no possibility for comments. Others let viewers freely comment, and still others require that respondents register so as to have filtering capabilities. Blogs with user comments are particularly useful for scientists to get feedback on periodic installments that may become a future publication.
Still New
Social media is part of our everyday lives, yet we often forget just how young most platforms actually are. Two of the most commonly used (Facebook and Twitter) are barely 15 years old.
Social media is used for a variety of reasons (or sometimes no particular reason), is incredibly diverse and continues to diversify (3). Because there is little or no filtering of any kind—no oversight and sometimes not enough self-restraint—social media is still in many ways the “Wild West.” Perfectly unheard-of people have huge numbers of followers. Anyone can come along and add an unpleasant comment to a useful post. Misleading or aggressive information is common and can be erased at the push of a button. Self-aggrandizing is commonplace.
All of the above contributes to an atmosphere that is the antithesis of neutrality and scholarship, so prized in scientific publication.
My recommendation is to treat social media like other forms of communication. You are professional and keep to the science at meetings and conferences—I suggest that you approach social media no differently.
Finally, social media—and more generally information networks—goes well beyond the scientist-centered world that we all know. Institutions, research administrators and librarians, funders and governments are all keenly interested in the value of research and in providing indicators to stakeholders and the general public. Accomplishing this requires the collection, processing and packaging of monumental quantities of diverse data. This is a burgeoning part of Open Science that promises to change the evaluation culture. Stay tuned.
1 Bik, H.M. & Goldstein, M.C., 2013. An introduction to social media for scientists. PLoS Biology, 11(4), p.e1001535; Van Noorden, R. 2014, Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network. Nature 512, 126-129.
2 Piwowar, H., 2013. Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature, 493(7431), p.159.
3 Sugimoto, C.R., Work, S., Larivière, V., et al., 2017. Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(9), pp.2037–2062.
4 Evidence is mixed that social media interest correlates with citations (Sugimoto et al., 2017, op. cit.).
5 Schnitzler, K., Davies, N., Ross, F., et al., 2016. Using TwitterTM to drive research impact: A discussion of strategies, opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 59, pp.15–26.
6 For example, Slideshare (https://www.slideshare.net/), hosts slideshows, webinars and videos.
7 Jamali, H.R., 2017. Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles. Scientometrics, 112(1), pp.241–254.
8 West, J., Bergstrom, T. & Bergstrom, C.T., 2010. Big Macs and Eigenfactor scores: Don’t let correlation coefficients fool you. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(9), pp.1800–1807.
9 de Winter, J.C.F., 2015. The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLoS ONE articles. Scientometrics, 102(2), pp.1773–1779; and reference therein.