The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Marine Biology, Science and Medical Education
- Keywords
- altmetrics, tweets, social media, scientific publishing
- Copyright
- © 2013 Darling et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 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
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.
