How Could Twitter
Influence Science (And Why Scientists Are on Board)
After some discussion here on Forbes
about the validity of “influence” in social
media,
news that Twitter has a significant impact on scientific citations is something
of a surprise. But could it be?
That
debate has been ongoing in the science community through January. The
possibility hit a wider public when Alexis Madrigal raised it in The Atlantic a couple of days ago.
The
bottom line is simple: articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times
more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its
implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for
papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an
article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a
real impact on a given field. However, because the majority of tweets about
journal articles occur within the first two days of publication, we now have an
early signal about which research is likely to be significant.
The relationship is not even
marginal. 11x more likely is a huge influence. The research appeared in the Journal
of Medical Internet Research, and was conducted by its editor Gunther
Eysenbach.
However
the data had already been challenged before The Atlantic article, both by a rebuttal – and by a suggestion
that the research author had a vested interest in the results:
What’s
more, many of these counted tweets were not sent out by humans,” says Phil
Davis at The Scholarly Kitchen after reviewing the data. “The Journal of
Medical Internet Research sends out an automatic tweet when a paper first
appears and then sends out monthly tweets to promote the journal’s most tweeted
papers. Tweets promoting the journal’s most viewed, most purchased, and most
cited articles (from Scopus and Google Scholar) are also sent out
automatically, many of which are then retweeted by other tweet bots (and human
bots) to the blogosphere.”
Davis
also points out that the work was not peer reviewed and that the journal editor
had registered a number of domains (twimpact.org, twimpactfactor.org and
twimpactfactor.com) that suggested he could make commercial advantage of this
research, though Eysenbach had fully disclosed this possibility.
UPDATE:
Mr Eysenbach points out in the comments that the paper was indeed peer reviewed
(the reference can also be found at the end of the article under
acknowledgements).
Eysenbach
then corrected the paper: but stood by the findings, claiming the
correction had no impact on the study’s conclusions.
By
this time the prestigious BMJ Group, publishers of the British Medical Journal, had taken it
up – but in its blogs section, concluding:
Whether
or not you agree with the validity of Eysenbach’s study, the very fact that it
has been published and discussed so widely is surely a testament to the
increasing importance of social metrics in evaluating article impact.
The
BMJ Group was interested because the Eysenbach paper had caused a stir in the Altmetrics
community, a
project set up to discuss the post-peer review environment.
Peer-review has served scholarship
well, but is beginning to show its age. It is slow, encourages conventionality,
and fails to hold reviewers accountable. Moreover, given that most papers are
eventually published somewhere, peer-review fails to limit the volume of
research.
As scholars migrate their
publication to the web, and publish earlier, the web offers a better way to
filter science or as Altmetrics puts it: “Instead of waiting months for two
opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations
and bookmarks in a week.”
# 1. We are creating knowledge in
new ways but have a philosophy of science
modeled on a pre-web way of working; we still tend to think of science and any
rigorous thinking as an object that we collectively cultivate and grow. I
wonder if this is a useful analogy any longer.
# 2. Eysenbach’s research may be a
useful early indicator of how social is changing science publishing but also a lesson for the wider community of
opinion formers that opinion forming is itself changing and we need to understand
its more fluid nature
# 3. What we know will change. For decades it has mattered where you publish and peer
review has been a brake on some innovative perspectives. It has tended to
defend established viewpoints. The possibility is that new interpretations of
experience can evolve and evolve rapidly. It needs a new philosophy of
knowledge.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2012/01/15/how-could-twitter-influence-science-and-why-scientists-are-on-board/?feed=rss_home
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