Liz Neeley and I discussed this in our 2014 paper.

In terms of social media outreach, or outreach in general, the impact on a scientist’s career remains largely unquantified and quite possibly indirect. “Many faculty members identified their primary job responsibilities as research and post-secondary teaching. They felt that outreach participation hindered their ability to fulfill those responsibilities and might be an ineffective use of their skills and time, and that it was not a valid use of their research funding”. In the survey by Ecklund et al., 31% of scientists felt that research university systems value research productivity, as indexed by grants and published papers, over everything else, including outreach. With this prioritization structure in place outreach may be perceived as unrelated to a scientist’s academic pursuits.

Perhaps because of both the ease of quantification and the impact is hypothesized to be direct, one specific question continues to generate considerable attention.   If a paper receives a significant number of social media mentions does it also receive a significant number of citations? If this correlation exist then this would support an argument that Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. about your scientific papers. This science communication would increase the exposure of your paper, including to scientists, eventually leading to more citations of that paper.  In this were true the impact of science communication would be direct and impact a metric that is used to evaluate scientists.

One of the largest studies on this topic, in analysis of 1.4 million documents published in PubMed and Web of Science published from 2010 to 2012, Haustein et al. found no correlation between a paper or a journals citation count and Twitter mentions.  However, multiple studies since do find a link between Tweets and citations rates including the papers of Peoples et al. and de Winter.

A new paper by Finch et al.  finds a link between social media mentions an citations also exists in the orthinology literature.  The authors set up the question nicely in the introduction

Weak positive correlations between social media mentions and future citations [5,8–10] suggest that online activity may anticipate or drive the traditional measure of scholarly ‘impact’. Online activity also promotes engagement with academic research, scholarly or otherwise, increasing article views and PDF downloads of PLoS ONE articles, for example [11,12]. Thus, altmetrics, and the online activity they represent, have the potential to complement, pre-empt and boost future citation rates, and are increasingly used by institutions and funders to measure the attention garnered by the research they support [13].

The findings? For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, the group found that an increase in social media mentions, as indexed by the Altmetric Score, from 1 to 20 resulted in 112% increase in citation count from 2.6 to 5.5 citations per article.

So drop what you’re doing and start Tweeting about your most recent paper RIGHT NOW! 

But wait…

All of these studies show a correlation and not causation.  Simply put, scientific papers with a lot of social media mentions also have lots of citations.  One hypothesis would be that communicating your science broadly increases its exposure and increases the probability of citation.  And it appears that often those advocating for science communication repeat this narrative despite there currently being no support for this hypothesis.  Why is there no support?

Because the correlation between social media mentions and citations could be equally explained by other hypotheses.

So an equally likely explanation for this correlation is that papers that are popular garner both numerous social media mentions and eventually numerous citations.

Tom Webb also makes an outstanding point about the authors of such studies.

The authors of this most recent study note this overall causation and correlation dilemma as well.

Instead, our results suggest that altmetrics might provide an initial and immediate indicator of a research article’s future scholarly impact, particularly for articles published in more specialist journals…The correlative nature of this and other studies makes it difficult to establish any causal relationship between online activity and future citations

So what now?  First stop arguing, as many did on Twitter today (examples here), that Tweeting about your paper is good thing because it will ultimately generate more citations.  The jury is still out on this and will be until a study specifically is designed to test for the causation and not the correlation.

The post Will Tweeting About Your Research Paper Get You More Citations? Meh. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now lets schedule some Tweets! You can do this through Twitter but honestly Twitter does not make this easy. It requires multiple steps. I prefer using Tweetdeck. Clicking the Tweet composing button brings up an option for scheduling the Tweet.

Some other tools for scheduling Tweets are also available (see this post also).  I also really like Twuffer for its easy display and ease of use.

Choose a time a minute or so past the start of your talk for your first Tweet. You may opt to schedule them to start later if you feel the culture of the conference is for talks to start several minutes past time. Schedule Tweets to hit one per minute apart form each other. Protip: Make sure the computer in which you schedule your Tweets from is set to the same time zone as the conference. Yeah I’ve made this mistake…in the last week…at my latest conference.

Load your presentation to SlideShare (You can see my presentations here). The first Tweet you schedule should be a link your entire presentation. This will make it easy for people to find figures and statements they may miss. Protip: Alternatively, you can go with figshare, which will give your presentation a DOI that can then be cited in papers and other works.

What should you Tweet? Anything related to your talk. Definitely Tweet links to your papers if you are talking about the research within in them. I like to provide a link to a downloadable PDF. However, indicate the link is a PDF so others are not caught by surprise by a downloading file.

Also Tweet any images you want disseminated, main points, links to relevant papers, and figures. Also Tweet a thanks to coauthors and acknowledgements. Protip: Make sure to use their Twitter handles. They can RT and help promote the talk to their networks. Make sure to use the conference hashtag!  Yeah I’ve messed up this one by using the wrong hashtag. Another Protip: Bonus points if you make your own hashtag so people can see all of your schedule Tweets.

Protip: Do not schedule too many Tweets. You need to find a balance between getting relevant information out and overwhelming the conference hashtag. As a general rule, do not schedule more Tweets than slides in your presentation. For a 12-15 talk plan on 10 or so Tweets. For a longer talk 30-60 minutes, plan on no more than 20. Trust me it takes a bit of work to schedule Tweets. You will be burned out by 20 or so.

Now get Tweeting.

The post Become a Social Media Pro User: Tweeting Your Own Talk first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Last Friday I delivered a preliminary talk on the opening night of ScienceOnline Oceans.  I am extremely flattered by the invitation and the enthusiastic reception to my talk.  Many asked me to post my slides online but I felt I needed to go a step further to provide more discussion, links, and points that an 10 minute presentation allowed.  I want to thank the Deep-Sea News team, Kevin Zelnio (@kzelnio), John Bruno (@JohnFBruno), and Liz Neely (@LizNeely) for many important discussions. These people have influenced me more than words can say.

1. I come from ocean outreach from a perspective that is much different from others.  I am first and foremost a scientist.  One that completely believes in research but equally in outreach.  I am scientist communicator. I also come from the perspective of building, with the help of many others, Deep-Sea News over the last 8 years.  In these years we have had many failures and successes.  I believe we have reached success.  Our community is amazing. Our hit rate reached 1 million last year and is expected to increase well over 2 million this year.  There is no indication that our popularity is tapering off.

2. Be Strategic. Be Deliberate. Coming from the perspective of a scientist, I often worry about finding time to do this.  I also want to do this effectively. We have to be more deliberate and strategic in the way we approach outreach online.   Otherwise we are wasting time.  In October 2011, all of us at DSN converged on Atlanta to hold a DSN retreat.  We collectively discussed our future. More importantly we discussed what we were trying to accomplish and the values that defined us.  We implemented this new collective vision in late 2011/early 2012 and something magical happened.  Our hit rate increased dramatically.  We went from linear growth to exponential growth. Go back and look at slide two and you can see for yourself this amazing transition.  It doesn’t matter what your mission is as long as you clearly define, understand, and work toward it.  Otherwise you are wasting time.

3. Branding…Branding…Branding...This, and the point of above, may seem corporate or trite but they matter.  At the retreat, we also decided to brand.  As Lois Geller at Forbes states “In one sense, perhaps the most important sense, a brand is a promise…You know what you’re going to get with a well-branded product or service.”  In this sense, you know you are getting at DSN.  We have outlined it in the core values. Most importantly for me is our tone, reverently irreverent, and that it comes directly from the mouths of scientists. Of course, our brand is visualized in the giant squid with an eye patch.  Why a giant squid? Because the giant squid can be a panda for the ocean. The eyepatch? Well this is DSN.

4. Find Your Niche and Story.  This applies across scales to a social media collective, blog, and individual posts.  Our brand, mission, and values are who we are.  We are consistently these day end and out.  But they are ours and they reflect a lot of who we are in non-online world.  When I add new people to the our online collective that match our niche.  Your niche and story may be different.  And that of course is ok. Of course not everyone agrees with our unqiue approach.  A recent comment on our blog

“This “oh-so-hip” presentation of a very interesting phenomenon is regrettable. I stopped reading halway [sic] through it as I couldn’t take any more. Just present the science. Tarting it up for people to read is pointless. Such readers have no value. Too bad, I would have liked to learn the real scinece [sic] presented here.”

I cannot disagree more with this commenter.  Our “tarting it up” is a core value for us. I mean have they read DSN before? We make science accessible, relevant, current, and of course fun.  You know what happens to science writing that isn’t these things?  Nobody reads it.  Readers, no matter their backgrounds and expectations, all have value.  They pay the taxes that fund our research.  We are part of the same community.  Frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where we cannot have fun and openly communicate about science.  Part of this is just telling a good story.  People listen to good stories.

5. Get a Super Team.  Everything you see in the Deep-Sea News Empire is a community effort.  I work hard to surround myself with people who are smarter and even more passionate about the oceans and outreach than me.  DSN wouldn’t exist without all of the contributors here.  But this is only one part.  I also believe in surrounding myself with a great community.  I am blessed on Twitter, Facebook, and here at the main site with a community of readers and commenters.  You are also DSN.  We put this idea in our core values too.

We believe the conversation between the public and science should not be one way. Vision, growth, and intelligent progress can only come through an open conversation that includes all stakeholders. We strive to provide a platform for diverse voices to be heard.

6. Embrace the World Around You. I despise the term public outreach.  As if I’m somehow not a member of the public.  I don’t feel like a scientist when I’m buying groceries or in traffic.  I’m a member of the public. This “public outreach” view has lead to a culture of science separate from society.  Instead science is embedded in society and culture.  The oceans greatly influence who we are. To ignore this simple idea spells disaster.  I get no greater joy than blending science with pop culture.  Old school hip-hop and bivalve genomes.  Hell yes. Internet memes. Let’s get some science in there. Science must be relevant and current.

7. Network + Good Story = Viral.  People crave a good story.  The local story-telling hour conducted here in the Triangle has taught me that people will come out in droves just to hear some really good stories…no matter the content. Whether sea cucumber who feed through their anuses or modern presidential elections impacted by ancient coastlines, people want to hear a really great story. A story they can tell others.  To get that good story out there you need a network.  An ocean super team.  Through our multiple social streams we tap new audiences, ones who share it with their friends, and continue to do so.  The DSN network is large and our traffic high because of our great readers who share DSN content.

8.  Stop Taking Refuge in Our Irrelevance.  I often hear from scientists that they don’t do outreach because no one will care about their research and interests.  But here is the ironic part.  No scientist goes to work thinking they do boring research.  I didn’t waste my time on 5 years of graduate program and decade of research thereafter because I thought snails were boring.  Snails are the best f’n thing since sliced white bread.  They aren’t even close to boring. So scientists have the passion. We just simply need to convey that to the public.  If you take only one message away from this post this is it:

Producing something popular on the internet is as much about passion as it is about good content. With passion and the right writing style, you can make any type of science cool. 

I firmly reject the idea that  sex, dinosaurs, chocolate, health, or climate change is the only the public cares about.  I’ve banked 8 years of my life on it.  I have 5 million hits at DSN that makes me think I’m right. Case in point.  My friend and colleague Chris Mah (@echinoblog) has a blog just about echinoderms.  That’s it.  In the few years he’s had a blog, Chris has amassed more hits than the population of Miami.  That’s an outreach win.

9. The Deficit Model is Dead. As the source of all information states, “[The deficit model] attributes public scepticism or hostility to a lack of understanding, resulting from a lack of information. It is associated with a division between experts who have the information and non-experts who do not. The model implies that communication should focus on improving the transfer of information from experts to non-experts.” We keep using this model in science outreach.  We’ve done it for decades.  We keep repeating the same message.  We raise our voices when people don’t change their behaviors or listen.  It is not working. What we need is better stories and personal connections.

10. Create prestige for public scholarship. As I mentioned before, the demand on our time requires we first and foremost publish, both the number and the impact matter.  We must write and ultimately receive grants to both maintain our research (to produce more papers) and keep grant funds flowing through our departments and universities.  Depending on the institution, we may also be required to teach and mentor students, and potentially do it well, and provide service to the school in the form of committees.   Of course part of the investment in mentoring is to ultimately increase our own research output.  These are the direct demands on our time that directly influence our careers.  This is the formula for success in traditional faculty positions.

This formula doesn’t include outreach.  People are surprised to hear that DSN is not part of my day job.  I and the others here do this in our free time.  And if we didn’t do it, in academia and among our colleagues we would be just a successful.  This must change.

I think it will change if we scientists begin to demand it. We are amidst a revolution in science. In the next decade, the landscape of science will radically change.  This revolution is being brought about two forces. One is the increased call for openness–open access, open source, open data, open conversations (via social media), open review, open participation (via citizen science). Two you cannot continue to fund science at 5-10% and expect the model to be sustaining especially when universities run more like businesses than institutions of learning.  As part of this revolution the formula will change too. Those not on board with the new science will get left behind.

11. Stop Treating Outreach & Research as Separate Entities. This new formula begins with us treating outreach as integral part of research instead of something we do when research is over for the day. People ask how I engage in outreach and research.  I accomplish because I can’t honestly tell you where one ends and the other begins.  And I don’t sleep.  Imagine a world where we create science anew. That is exciting.  Graduates read the literature and engage the online community through social media.  Scientists tweeting photos of the organism under their microscopes. Scientist live plotting data online.  This is the model we need. We train students and colleagues to conduct outreach in separate classes, programs, and times.  This must stop.  I think a new model incorporates the two explicitly.  I am trying out this model with Sizing Ocean Giants. Halfway through the semester it appears to be a success.  

12. Become a Nerd of Trust (extra point) Everyone lately is discussing that social media may be feeding into our ivory tower.  Simply put the conversations on social media are still one way from academic to the public.  I don’t think this true.  Scientists online have become nerds for trust.  Need someone to answer a starfish question. Chris is there. Need DSN to identify a bizarre ocean animal, debunk mermaids, or provide conservation advice? Hell that’s our bread and butter.  We are becoming a service industry.  The best example of this I see is on Facebook.  When my friends and family have an ocean question, I’m their nerd.  When I have a health question, I ask my friend the medical doctor.  A weight lifting friend, I as my friend a fitness coach.  I surround myself with people who are experts on a variety of subjects.  I ask for their input and advice everyday.  Any single conversation may be unidirectional from expert to the naive, but our collective conversations are constant back and forth.

The post Lessons From Creating an Online Outreach Empire first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Given this scenario, fellow marine blogger Miriam Goldstein and I are and I pleased to announce the publication of a new perspectives article in PLoS Biology:

Bik HM, Goldstein MC. An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists. PLoS Biology, 11(4):e1001535. 

The idea for this article evolved from conference workshops we ran together (particularly the social media workshop at the Ocean Sciences 2012 Meeting), late night hotel room discussions, and chats with friends, colleagues and our fellow Deeplings (thanks guys!). And the fact that I personally didn’t know what I was doing on the internet for a solid 2 years after I started blogging/tweeting. In fact, a lot of scientists we’ve encountered feel lost and misguided when it comes to social media. Or they want to start blogging/tweeting but have no idea where to begin (grad students and postdocs don’t get much training in this area, and senior PIs don’t usually encourage it).

We hope this article will help you navigate the internet and define your own social media strategy (come on marine scientists, lead the pack!) – please share it with your offline colleagues, and get in touch with any questions or comments!

The post An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists, now in PLoS Biology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This isn’t the story I usually tell. I usually say that I always liked to write, and that I was inspired by the communications education at the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, and that I had been reading other blogs like Deep Sea News and Blogfish and Malaria etc. and Pharyngula, and wanted to join the conversation. All this is true.

But really, I started blogging as I sat for long hours as my mother slowly – too slowly – faded away from cancer. It was non-smoking-related lung cancer that had spread to her brain, and she hadn’t been aware for weeks.  There was no conversation to make. I had dropped all my second-year graduate school classes so there was no work to do. There was just a quiet house, and a computer, and the promise that there were other things in the world beside this.

Part of my writing was motivated by that promise. The other part was motivated by the people. Online, I found people who cared about the same issues I did, who balanced science and communication, who were hilarious and irreverent, and who also believed that one of the keys to saving the ocean was just trying to pay more attention. Meeting in person was almost always a delight, and causing a bit of trouble together (#DSNsuite, anyone?) even more of a delight.

Now, over five years later, blogging and other social media (mostly Twitter), have taken me farther than I ever thought possible. Blogging about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch motivated my doctoral dissertation. The social media skills I developed through independent blogging helped to make the SEAPLEX cruise more successful than I ever thought possible. Blogging about iron fertilization, and seafood, and privilege, gave me the ability to help shape a larger conversation about what the world should be. And blogging was one of the major reasons that I was selected for my current job, which is the reason that I’m writing this post.

I love science. I love spending time with my creature friends (even I did kill them to begin with) – delicate bubble snails and flower-like jellyfish and graceful little copepods. I love figuring out what they are, and asking questions about what’s going on with them, and poking around in the ocean and in the lab until some answers (and more questions) pop up. But there is only so far science can take us. Science can inform, but cannot decide, the hard choices that we as a species must now make.

Starting this February, I’m entering the policy arena as a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow. For the next year, I’ll have the honor of working at the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, Democratic staff, particularly with the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affairs. Part of the reason I’m able to do this is that I was able to show rather convincingly that I had plenty of experience translating technical information for a general audience. In fact, the interview went something like this:

“We see that you are a qualified scientist, but can you write?”
“Yes.”
“You seem very confident.”
“Google me.”
“Ok, you can write.”

I’m beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to spend a year at the center of United States environmental policy. But to grow, you have to give something up, and independent participation in social media – especially on issues relevant to the Committee – is not compatible with politics. So, starting on February 4th, just after the Science Online conference, I’ll be taking at least a year-long leave of absence from all public social media.

I don’t know what will happen after that year, since I don’t know what will become of me. Perhaps I’ll re-emerge in a research post-doc position, free to participate online as I please, and with lots of stories to tell. Perhaps I’ll fall in love with Capitol Hill, stay in policy, and continue to avoid a public online presence. Perhaps there’s another path that I don’t know about yet. Regardless, please know that it is all of you – friends and commenters and lurkers – that have made the last five years a formative experience in my life, and a tremendous source of pleasure.

My activities and contact information will continue to be updated on my professional website, and you can follow the Natural Resources Committee Democrats on various social media.

Fair winds and following seas.

The post To take arms against a sea of troubles: my life in blogging, and farewell first appeared on Deep Sea News.

TheBlu began as an art and entertainment project for the folks at the MIT media lab and WemoMedia, a gaming and online entertainment company where Spiteri is a primary.  Over time the idea of a sort of 3D digital canvas where digital artists could practice creating realistic undersea critters soon turned into something much bigger.  When showing it around, Spiteri noted how the idea resonated with Education folks as a potentially great instructional tool.  Others saw it going in other directions, mostly around gaming and social media.  Over time, the creators hedged on these and settled on a goal of making a virtual ocean world using open source code so users could assemble content  by designing and adding new species, each based on a real one, and letting users make of it what they will.  The result is a web-based experience that’s part casual aesthetic experience, part teaching tool, part game and part social media app.  Users are invited to explore the different habitats, “collecting” new species (in the manner of birders with their life lists) and using each animal as a portal to interact with other users or to click out to external data sources about that animal or it’s ecosystem.

So what’s it like?  Well, the visual feel of TheBlu is great.  Surface waters ripple serenely and sunlight beams dance on sand waves on the bottom to create a very pleasing and pretty realistic effect.  The gaming design and movie CGI heritage of TheBlu shows here; the graphic feel of the environment is about the level of many current-day console games or a bit like being in Finding Nemo.  One important difference from many games is that it is not a first person free-form experience.  In other words, you don’t move through the world, but rather you toggle between different camera viewpoints that tilt and pan to look around.  Once you click on an animal, though, the camera view switches to a quasi first person view from the animal’s perspective.  This way of looking at the world takes a little getting used to, but quickly begins to make sense as you play with it.

Several “spheres” are available, which biologists would call ecosystems, like coral reefs and deep seas (above, the newest)  and even sandy zones where the water isn’t as clear, which is a nice touch of realism.  The bottom fauna is pretty sparse, a result of the current focus on creating fish, sharks and marine mammals (about 100 species have so far been created).  Over time, the bottom should fill up with sponges, corals and macroalgae, where these are appropriate.

The individual fish are nicely done.  Normally I hate fish art because it usually looks tacky, but these are sufficiently realistic to pass general muster.  Some haven’t been perfected yet; the sailfish is handsome but has funky pelvic fins and doesn’t move naturally, and Spiteri and I share a laugh over a razor fish that swims horizontally (this species’ sole claim to fame is swimming vertically).  The greatest sense of artificiality probably derives not from the fish themselves but from their behaviours.  Site-attached reef fishes swim up in the water column while ambush predators like barracuda sometimes wriggle around in most uncharacteristic fashion.  Over time, as the collaboration between digital artists and biologists increases, many of these issues ought to be sorted out and more naturalistic behaviours will take over.  One example is the recent addition of schooling fish in the form of shoals of sardines and to go with it, the  programming of predatory behaviour in some fishes like the barracuda shown below.

After a while playing with it, I conclude that TheBlu is a strange sort of creature, but one with a future if it catches on.  It’s sort of an oceanic Second Life, with a healthy dose of FourSquare and a splash of Farmville.   It looks terrific and the music is great.  I applaud the makers for choosing an open source approach, although I guess  they had to if they ever wanted to reach the goal of having all marine species represented; even the biggest software companies around would take generations to do that, whereas an army of users could at least make a good start, Wikipedia-style, in a reasonable timeframe.  The greatest question then, is WILL THEY?  It’s sort of an “if you build it, they will come” thing, and I’m wondering whether the user base will reach the critical mass that is a prerequisite for any user-assembled endeavour to thrive.  In this, I think they’ll be helped by crystallising their goals at least a little more (game? teaching tool? social media app?).  At the end of the day I hope it DOES take off, especially in the classroom, where it has great potential for capturing the imagination of Generation X-Box and maybe introducing them to marine biology in a way that they can relate to.

TheBlu is currently in Beta testing with several thousand users.  If you want to check it out yourself, I have ten free beta access codes to give away.  Five to the first comers in the comments section, and five to the first folks to DM me on Twitter

The post Into TheBlu, virtually first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Bora Zivkovic an expert about scientific blogging and microblogging, and chair of ScienceOnline states that

Twitter forces one to think about the economy of words, to become much more efficient with one’s use of language. It takes work and thought and practice to get to the point of tweeting truly well. I remember Jay Rosen once saying that some of his tweets take 45 minutes to compose and edit until he is satisfied that the text uses the words for maximal clarity and impact. There is no luxury in using superfluous language and the result can be a crystal-clear statement or description that far outshines the often-wordy original [paper, news article, blog post].

Perhaps the best way to think of Twitter as relevant to science was put forth by James Dacey

It’s been compared to a cocktail party where multiple conversations, all taking place at once, result in that familiar cacophony of chitchat. Some people thrive in this environment, while others feel jarred, but eventually we all drag ourselves along to one because we know that’s the real place to hear the interesting stuff for our careers. Researchers need to get themselves onto Twitter pronto because it is fast becoming the place to find out the breakthroughs in your research field.

How is Twitter used?

Twitter is increasingly becoming a platform for breaking news, including new scientific discoveries.  Twitter is primarily used in 6 ways (h/t to Bora again for this).

1. Eavesdropping: follow informative people to get information and learn
2. Dialogue: exchange, discuss, and debate information
3. Broadcast: used by news organizations and businesses to inform audience about news or products/services
4. Data collection: e.g. using Tweeting fishermen to monitor fish populations.
5. Accidental journalism: e.g. landing on Hudson river, Mumbai attacks, Iran post-election protests
6. Mindcasting:  following a single story or topic, with links, for a period of time, e.g. like my ongoing coverage of the #oilspill at @DrCraigMc

Can meaningful content be conveyed on Twitter?

Much like blogs were viewed five years ago, many may ask whether this is another social medium used by youth to broadcast their daily inane events.  However, valuable content is consistently provided by Twitter. For example, Twitter has proved a remarkable aggregator of information concerning the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (follow the #oilspill hashtag). That Twitter conveys meaningful content is also reflected by the fact that the tweets will by archived by the Library of Congress.

David Winer who pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software, served as editor at Wired Magazine, and a research fellow at Harvard Law School stated that

Twitter is a news system, today, it will be more of a news system in the future, and whatever becomes of Twitter the company or their web service, the essentials of what Twitter does is an integral part of the news system of the future.

In paper published in BioScience, John Eisen commented that

“To do science, you have to know what’s going on in science,” Eisen says. “I found Twitter…most useful for becoming informed of what other people are doing in science.” By sharing comments, links, information, and notes about new scientific developments with trusted sources, Eisen says, he is better able to keep up with the vast amount of information in his fields of interest. Twitter and other social networks such as FriendFeed, he says, enable “real-time highlighting and ranking and tracking of what’s going on in the world of science.” Twitter is also useful for networking and finding collaborators.

A great number of scientists, science journalists, and others tweeting about science can be found on Twitter. www.sciencebase.com, science writer’s David Bradley’s web site provides an ongoing list. In a recently published paper, researchers found that scholars cite science papers on Twitter and citations are part of a conversation that moves faster than traditional citations.  The researchers suggested that Twitter could be a useful source for bibliometricians and others interested in scholarly communication. Recently this was best exemplified in a contest where Twitter users were encouraged to Tweet about science papers and findings under the hashtag #sci140 referring to science being presented in 140 characters.  Some of the highlights include

• Salt of DNA structure= double helix. Strands anti-parallel; has implications. (PS Rosie didn’t help)
• We did some messing about with wire and stuff, found double helix fits the Xray patterns of DNA. Rest is obvious. Suck that, Linus!
• dog + bell + food = saliva. Repeat. Eventually dog + bell = saliva, where’s my nobel prize?
• Oops, Who would’ve thought that absolute power corrupts absolutely? (Zimbardo,1971)
• Dropped heavy and light ball at Pisa; saw landed at same time. Peer review problems now, especially after telescope incident.
• cat in box + decay triggered poison. box closed: cat alive & dead. when box opened: cat live or dead #Schrodinger
• It’s impossible to determine whether a guy with an infinite piece of paper will ever stop doing math. http://bit.ly/9qKV5E

40% of Tweets on a paper occur within one week of the cited resource’s publication (ap0logies to Jason Priem for not linking to his fantastic paper, see his comments below).  While Twitter citations are different from traditional citations, survey participants in one study suggest that they still represent and transmit scholarly impact. The survey participants also suggested that Twitter allows them to (1) to share knowledge, study, work about their field of expertise, (2) to communicate about some of their research projects, (3) to increase their network, and (4) to communicate about venues (conference, workshops, tutorial, talk, etc.

Twitter provides one the most important online tools to bring together researchers despite discipline or geography to share information about science. Moreover, Twitter provides a steady stream of cutting edge science but accessible information to public.  Thus Twitter as a tool realizes scientific collaboration, the synthesis of ideas and information, and communication of science to the public.

p.s. don’t forget to follow me at at @DrCraigMc

The post What is Twitter and Why Scientists Need To Use It. first appeared on Deep Sea News.