The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication

Emily S Darling; David Shiffman; Isabelle M. Côté; Joshua A Drew

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.16v1

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The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication

Emily S Darling¹, David Shiffman², Isabelle M. Côté¹, Joshua A Drew ³

May 7, 2013

Highlighted in PeerJ Picks 2014 Collection

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Abstract

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.

Cite this as

Darling ES, Shiffman D, Côté IM, Drew JA. 2013. The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e16v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.16v1

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Competing Interests

There are no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Emily S Darling conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper.

David Shiffman conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper.

Isabelle M. Côté conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper.

Joshua A Drew conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper.

Funding

The study was self funded.

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4347 days ago - David Roberts

I would strongly suggest that the authors also update the arXiv version of this paper (is this even possible at PeerJ?), which is entirely possible, and they can point out in the comments field the availability of the paper here (with doi + citation). I read somewhere that the authors felt that this paper should go into some sort of preprint service, so submitted version 2 here after version 1 was placed in the arXiv, and then the paper is also submitted to another journal. Respectfully: what on earth do they think the arXiv is? Some sort of glorified filing cabinet? (Ahem, rant over) I do agree that perhaps for the audience they seek, PeerJ Preprints would be more highly visible; this is fine, but please don't leave the arXiv version of the paper an orphan.

If the publisher allows posting of "post-prints" or "author accepted manuscript" (etc), please put that in the arXiv too as version 3 - with cross references to the journal. Ideally, the authors could put the arXiv/PeerJ Preprint references into the published paper, preferably in publicly visibly metadata.

4346 days ago - Jason Hoyt

On question of versioning at PeerJ PrePrints - Yes, in fact this is due out next week. I suspect the authors submitted to PeerJ PrePrints since it has feedback functionality and other resources that fit their needs better.

4346 days ago - David Roberts

"fit their needs better." By all means :-) And I look forward to the day when there is something like PeerJ available for pure mathematicians like me. Thanks for all your hard work, Jason + PeerJ team.

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4345 days ago - Tim McCormick

Thanks for this interesting paper. I think the "article lifecycle" perspective is a useful one, complementing the various "social media guide for scientists" (scientist, not paper, point of view) out there.

One observation: the paper seems to suggest the science/scientist's presence in social media will be through the scientist directly interacting with and generating content into the social networks. I would say that in many cases it will be more likely or sensible for this dissemination to occur through mediation of other parties/systems, such as publishers or peers or journalists/communicators.

I explore these possibilities in a post from January, "How To Bring Academics to the Social-Media Party? Indirectly." (http://tjm.org/2013/01/14/how-to-bring-academics-to-the-social-media-party-indirectly/).

Strong, direct social-media engagement involves significant learning, time, risk, and particular skills. I'm not convinced we can, should, or need to expect a large portion of scientists to devote this effort, given all the other demands on them. In many cases, intermediaries may taken on parts of this -- just as they do the running of journal platforms, scholarly societies, conferences, etc. I think social media should and gradually will be just woven into many existing activities and tools: in the words of Mark Weiser, "the most profound technologies are those that disappear."

----

Tim McCormick

@tmccormick / http://tjm.org / Palo Alto, CA, USA

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4335 days ago - Isaac Mao

Please refer to my short story on the original use of RT(re-tweet), which may help understand the meme spreading model better. http://storify.com/isaac/a-brief-history-of-rt#publicize

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3001 days ago - Peter Ellis

The claim in line 181 that the median number of followers of these scientists is 730 times the size of the department seems to be an error. Median number of followers is reported as 241, median department size 33, so correct ratio is 7.3 (and only one decimal place appropriate). Unfortunately this order of magnitude typo has made it to an infographic: http://www.americanscientist.org/blog/pub/the-benefits-of-twitter-for-scientists

I understand this was corrected to "seven" in publication, but the infographic referred to above is based on the preprint 730 figure.

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