Source-linked AI summary
The role of twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication
Emily S. Darling1, David Shiffman, Isabelle M. Côté, Joshua A. Drew
TL;DR
The paper examines social media’s role in accelerating scientific communication, including the sharing of unpublished work. It identifies Twitter’s value across the publication life cycle while noting pitfalls involving ownership and workflow integration.
Problem
Social media may accelerate scientific communication, but sharing unpublished work lacks general incentives.
Method
The paper examines how social media can be integrated into the life cycle of a scientific paper.
Results
Including social media in the life cycle of a scientific paper can provide unexpected value.
Takeaways & Limitations
Social media offers a potentially valuable addition to the scientific publication workflow.
Takeaways & Limitations
Integrating social media into scientific workflows raises potential pitfalls, including intellectual-property and ownership issues.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Twitter is a micro-blogging social media platform for short messages that can have a long-term impact on how scientists create and publish ideas. We investigate the usefulness of twitter in the development and distribution of scientific knowledge. At the start of the life cycle of a scientific publication, twitter provides a large virtual department of colleagues that can help to rapidly generate, share and refine new ideas. As ideas become manuscripts, twitter can be used as an informal arena for the pre-review of works in progress. Finally, tweeting published findings can communicate research to a broad audience of other researchers, decision makers, journalists and the general public that can amplify the scientific and social impact of publications. However, there are limitations, largely surrounding issues of intellectual property and ownership, inclusiveness and misrepresentations of science sound bites. Nevertheless, we believe twitter is a useful social media tool that can provide a valuable contribution to scientific publishing in the 21st century.
Social media and the life cycle of a paper
Twitter can expand scientists’ networks beyond their institutions, accelerate interdisciplinary connections, and support collaboration, idea development, and scientific communication throughout the publication life cycle.
- Making connections: More, faster, and interactive: Conference live-tweeting lets scientists who are absent or in another session follow and partly participate in presentations’ discussions.At one conference, 1731 tweets from 176 delegates could have reached at least 110,000 users.
- Making connections: More, faster, and interactive: Twitter offers a larger “virtual department” of professional connections beyond scientists’ institutions and across disciplines.These broader networks can accelerate interdisciplinary research.
- Making connections: More, faster, and interactive: About 55% of followers were students, scientists, or scientific organizations, while 45% were non-scientists, media, or the general public.The audience therefore includes both potential collaborators and people who may disseminate findings.
- Making connections: More, faster, and interactive: The authors report that Twitter enormously speeds new connections, contributing to collaborations and scientific outputs.They cite the commentary itself as an example.
Moving ideas forward: open science in real time
Twitter can support the transition from ideas to manuscripts by enabling rapid discussion and informal pre-review, although researchers face cultural and intellectual-property concerns.
- Moving ideas forward: open science in real time: The authors conclude that social media can play a valuable role in turning ideas into publications during the scientific workflow.They note that social media itself will not write a manuscript.
- Moving ideas forward: open science in real time: A Twitter exchange about an unpublished finding connected a non-scientist seeking a less technical explanation with a scientist holding relevant data.The exchange opened the door to a future collaboration.
- Moving ideas forward: open science in real time: Ecology and evolution have been slower to adopt online pre-review because unpublished-work sharing lacks an established culture and professional incentives.The field may also lack dedicated platforms for discussing work in progress.
- Moving ideas forward: open science in real time: Social media can provide an open, free service for crowdsourcing expert and non-expert opinions on work in progress.The authors position this as a way to develop ideas before submitting a final product to a peer-reviewed journal.
- Moving ideas forward: open science in real time: Sharing ideas on social media may allow others to claim them before publication, but dated, searchable posts can provide a time stamp for authorship.Tweets are archived and searchable, while uploaded figures or presentations can receive citeable DOIs.
Increasing reach
Twitter can extend the reach of published research through retweets, direct access to decision makers, and journalist engagement, but passive dissemination is insufficient.
- Increasing reach: Active dissemination is needed because simply hoping that published work will be discovered is a poor strategy.Tweeting requires more time and effort than passive dissemination.
- Increasing reach: Nearly 47% of tweets linking to peer-reviewed articles in a small academic sample were retweets.Retweeting can substantially expand an article’s audience beyond the initial author’s followers.
- Increasing reach: Tweets and retweets can reach nongovernmental organizations, industry, government agencies, and non-scientists, including decision makers.Users can also tweet directly to decision makers who do not follow them.
- Increasing reach: Twitter can expose research to journalists: a tweet about a cookiecutter shark paper led to contact from science journalists and subsequent news coverage.The paper had been online for three months before the tweet drew this attention.
- Increasing reach: Tweets can communicate discoveries or conclusions more informally and informatively than a paper title and may complement conventional conference outputs.The authors describe tweetable vision statements as outputs that can reach policy makers and politicians through retweeting.
Increasing impact
The paper argues that scientific impact extends beyond citation counts to broader reach and use, with Twitter contributing to dissemination, critique, and alternative impact measurement. Twitter also enables rapid, low-effort responses to published work, although altmetrics remain vulnerable to manipulation and should complement rather than replace traditional bibliometrics.
- Broader impact: Citation counts provide an unduly narrow measure of scientific impact because they omit use beyond academia and the range of communities reached.Alternative metrics capture broader reach through downloads, social-media mentions, and online bookmarking.
- Limitations: Altmetrics remain controversial because downloads and tweeting can be artificially inflated through fake accounts, automated downloads, or robot tweeting.The paper describes emerging defenses against such manipulation but retains this concern as a limitation of alternative indicators.
- Broader impact: Altmetrics complement traditional citation measures by capturing different types of impact for different audiences.The paper notes that their use may influence how scientific outputs are recognized and rewarded as institutions value policy relevance and demonstrated outcomes.
- Post-publication critique: Twitter offers rapid, low-effort comments that can focus attention on serious problems in published papers and support prompt identification of weak science.The paper contrasts this activity with limited engagement in journal-hosted commenting, where fewer than 20% of articles in high-impact medical print journals received comments.
- Post-publication critique: Organizing tweet sequences into coherent narratives can help readers assess the weight of evidence in post-publication critiques.The paper suggests that journals could appoint online tweet editors to collect and present tweets related to their papers.
Limitations of social media in the scientific workflow
Twitter can accelerate scientific communication but introduces risks involving openness, intellectual property, inclusiveness, and the loss or distortion of nuance. These limitations constrain who participates, how ideas are exposed, and how complex scientific discussions are understood.
- Intellectual property and ownership: Open discussions of grants, data, and papers can expose scientists to scooping and intellectual-property disputes.Social-media platforms may rebroadcast content without explicit permission, raising questions about idea distribution and ownership.
- Misrepresentation and openness: Transparent conversations reach broad audiences, allowing frank debates about data interpretation to be hijacked or portrayed as evidence that results are questionable.The paper uses Climategate to illustrate how scholarly debate can be conflated with fabrication and used to discredit findings.
- Inclusiveness: Only a small proportion of scientists tweet, estimated at 1 in 40, and users therefore may not represent the broader scientific community.The authors specifically identify inclusiveness as a concern when relying on social media for scientific work.
- Inclusiveness: Twitter participation is non-random: 62% of surveyed marine scientists, or 73 of 116, received their PhD within the last 5 years, although experienced scientists also tweet.The resulting community is skewed toward younger investigators and newer academics, whose experiences may differ from those of the traditional scientific community.
- Science soundbites: Twitter’s character limit encourages brevity but can remove important nuances, misrepresent phrases, or oversimplify ideas too complex for one tweet.The authors suggest successive tweets or links to blogs and journal articles when ideas require more extensive explanation.
Conclusions
Social media, particularly Twitter, has changed how scientists interact within and beyond academia. The authors argue that incorporating it into the publication life cycle can provide unexpected value, despite requiring experimentation with scholarly communication.
- Social media has changed how scientists interact with one another and with policy and public audiences beyond academia.
- The authors hope their experiences with Twitter will encourage hesitant scientists to try incorporating social media into scientific publishing.
- Including social media in a scientific paper’s life cycle can provide great and unexpected value.
- Trying new approaches and taking risks will be part of the future of scholarly communication and publication.