It is not only aiding the struggling and overwhelmed marketing efforts of publishers but it is also a way to do your work justice, to dare to be public about your intellectual work. A critical platform.
There is nothing like seeing the sharp television criticism of New Yorker journalist emilynussbaum , the everyday analysis of sociologist tressiemcphd or the home appliance criticism of media theorist ibogost unfold in real time on Twitter.
Twitter is a way to engage in lively critique: it is a vibrant medium for pithy reviews, trenchant commentary and subtle demystification. A community. The environmental policy scholar raulpacheco started his scholarsunday hashtag as a way to bring scholars together on Twitter, and it has been so successful that now it seems like every day of the week is Sunday.
So if you feel like posing a question to a scholar you admire -- or just placing a question out in the seeming void -- there is a good chance that you will get a response, and usually it will be smart and useful.
And then you may end up having a drink with your virtual respondent at a conference in the future, and possibly forming an ongoing friendship, professional collaboration or both It is worth repeating No. You can actually draft entire essays, book chapters and conference papers on Twitter and then get live feedback as you go. It is scary sometimes, of course, to write in public -- to reveal your research before a legitimate outlet like a university press or a well-regarded journal has vetted or published it.
But, in the end, this is a leap of faith that will almost always make the work better -- the end being publication elsewhere, like here. This piece started as a handful of tweets about how I use Twitter as an academic. Read more by Christopher Schaberg.
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Beyond Gatekeepers. Shared Governance Within the Autocratic Academy. Testing Can Save Democracy. Free College or Bust. Higher Ed Gamma. Twitter mentions are an important alternative metric, or altmetric, a way of rigorously tracking the non-scholarly attention a paper receives. An article last year claimed that scientists should spend more time on Twitter if they want a higher h-index, although this piece was ridiculed with no small level of irony by a number of high-profile scientists on Twitter.
This is another positive for the platform — it serves as a forum for users to connect freely with the wider community. Twitter can also be used in more technically intriguing ways. Automated paper-searching bots have been created to scour journals and platforms for articles of interest. By following a few relevant bots, or even just the Twitter accounts of journals you are interested in, your feed could be transformed into a digest of relevant papers. On the topic of automation, Twitter was also used as a platform for automated chemical synthesis last year.
One group at the University of Glasgow, UK, linked a number of chemical-synthesis robots by getting them to communicate exclusively over Twitter. One practical use for Twitter is the communication of changes in your research group. This is particularly useful when a group is advertising new vacancies, which, before Twitter, could be posted only on specialized websites, often for a fee, and viewed by just a handful of people. Now, job vacancies can be posted on Twitter for free and are seen by a wider audience.
Perhaps the most obvious, and most important, aspect of Twitter is that the platform facilitates a closer, more informal connection between scientists. It can be difficult to see the true nature and personality of authors through the mountains of academic papers they produce.
Getting a more human perspective on the big shots we look up to can be refreshing; we can learn about both their science and their wider views, hobbies and the like. By having a more personal line of communication with each other, rather than relying on e-mail correspondence, scientists can connect and form fruitful relationships more easily.
Procrastination on social media is not always a negative. Like many scientists, Fred Hutch virologist Dr. Trevor Bedford had at first dismissed Twitter as a place where people posted what they had for lunch. He credits a colleague, computational biologist Dr. Erick Matsen ematsen with showing him that it can be used to talk about science.
Bedford trvrb now tweets, he estimates, about once every other day, often about papers in his field that catch his eye. He wound up taking part in a live Twitter discussion. Twitter, he said, has the advantage of lowering barriers to access but not in a way that drains too much time. He throws out quick questions himself, most recently trying to nail down solid information on the number of Zika cases reported.
Bedford and his longtime collaborator, German physicist, and computational biologist Dr. Richard Neher richardneher , are using genetic sequences to draw up a phylogenetic tree, or genetic history, for the Zika virus , just as they did for the Ebola virus and have long done for influenza.
Real-time tracking of genetic mutations during disease outbreaks helps scientists discern what makes viruses so severe and inform public health efforts to contain them.
Being able to do so depends on researchers openly sharing data, something that not all scientists embrace in a world of competition to publish in prestigious journals and stake claims to discoveries. Researchers who use Twitter tend to believe, as Bedford does, that sharing preliminary information quickly speeds discoveries and is therefore good for both science and society.
What do you think about scientists using social media? Join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. Previously, she covered medicine and health policy for the Los Angeles Times, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
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