The success of academic research in reaching out beyond its own scientific community is a perennial concern, even more so following the rapid adoption of social media and the ability to easily transmit information to potentially millions of people. Consequently, many attempts have been made to capture the broad scientific impact beyond academia using social media data. But is increased […]
Category: Twitter
Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017)
Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval […]
Twitter can help with scientific dissemination but its influence on citation impact is less clear
Researchers have long been encouraged to use Twitter. But does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers? José Luis Ortega explored to what extent the participation of scholars on Twitter can influence the tweeting of their articles and found that although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of […]
2016 in review: a selection of the top LSE Impact Blog posts of the year
Continuing what is by now an established Impact Blog tradition, editor Kieran Booluck looks back at all that’s published over the last twelve months and shares a selection of the year’s top posts. It’s been another record-breaking year at the Impact Blog! Last year was the first time we recorded in excess of one million pageviews in a single year, […]
Research Resilience: Why academics and funders alike should care about #RIPTwitter
Twitter is under close scrutiny these days with news that its timeline could be subject to further algorithmic control. Farida Vis looks at what such dramatic changes could mean for research. There is a great need for both funding councils and researchers to better understand the potential impact of these data and platform politics. Strategies must be developed to encourage lesser reliance on […]
Q+A with Bonnie Stewart: “We are part of a society and an academy where the personal/professional divide is blurring”
LSE’s NetworkED seminar series for 2016 kick starts this Wednesday (20 January) with Bonnie Stewart. Here she provides a brief look into her research on scholarly identities and how relatively open social spaces like Twitter can be used by scholars for immersive professional development. But, she notes, this space is not without risks. The session will be streamed live and can be […]
Amplified messages: How hashtag activism and Twitter diplomacy converged at #ThisIsACoup – and won.
Online activism is a frequently debated topic amongst journalists and researchers alike. What effect can a popular Twitter hashtag really have in achieving political or social change? Wasim Ahmed looks in depth at last year’s heavily tweeted #ThisIsACoup hashtag. While concrete outcomes may still be indeterminate, it is clear social media is now a rich space for activism, expressions of solidarity and […]
Using Vine to disseminate library information: a practical guide.
Vine is a Twitter app which allows short, looping videos to be created quickly and easily. There are a number of reasons for making videos and sharing. Antony Groves describes how the University of Sussex Library use Vine for teaching basic skills, promoting events, and advertising opening hours. Here he also provides a helpful five-step guide to creating and sharing a […]
Scientists across disciplines must get to a better agreement on social media metrics.
Kate Wing breaks down the criteria used for Science magazine’s list of Top Scientists on Twitter and finds the approach severely lacking. With a range of tools available for measuring social media impact, simplistic measures like follower number as a proxy of influence is outdated. But for all the flaws in Science’s approach, they have opened up a conversation about what should be […]
Publicly available data from Twitter is public evidence and does not necessarily constitute an “ethical dilemma”.
An article in Scientific American suggests further ethical considerations should be made for research derived from Twitter data. Ernesto Priego questions first the extent to which Twitter will actually release all of its valuable data and also argues archiving and disseminating information from Twitter and other public archives does not have to be cause for an “ethical dilemma” so long as […]