Type vaccines into twitter and under a new initiative you will be prompted towards information supplied by expert institutions such as the NHS or US Department of Health and Human Services. However, by directing audiences to these sources, do social media companies overlook the important role played by online communities of lay experts? In this post Stefania Vicari explores how […]
Category: Twitter
Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (2019)
Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. In this post, Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms. This post builds upon the 2015, and 2017 editions of […]
Building online personas: Has social media become an exercise in self-branding?
In this post, Gal Oestreicher-Singer, Hilah Geva, and Maytal Saar-Tsechansky, discuss the extent to which users of twitter use the platform in order to diversify their identities, or to maintain ‘on message’ branded identities. Presenting a novel methodology, their findings suggest that twitter has become a tool for targeted self promotion, behaviour that is especially prevalent in professional bloggers. More than 20 […]
Don’t be a giraffe – How to avoid trolls on academic social media
Social media has acquired a reputation for being a highly polarised and argumentative public sphere. Whereas, the vast majority of academic social media is generally good natured, it can also be plagued by bad actors. In this post, Andy Tattersall shares a number of simple measures and tips on how to deal with the dark side of social media. When […]
Nothing lasts forever: questions to ask yourself when choosing a new tool or technology for research
Academia has become increasingly reliant on third-party tools and technologies to carry out many of the processes throughout the research lifecycle. But there are genuine concerns about the sustainability of some of these tools and what the implications would be for users in the event they were discontinued. Andy Tattersall suggests a series of straightforward questions researchers should ask themselves […]
How was social media cited in 2014 REF Impact Case Studies?
In their previous Impact Blog post, Katy Jordan and Mark Carrigan considered whether institutions have invested too much hope in social media as a solution to the problem of demonstrating research impact. Here they report on research analysing how social media was cited in impact case studies submitted to the UK’s REF 2014. Around a quarter of case studies contained […]
Economists, unlike scientists, do a poor job of communicating via Twitter
Twitter is well established as a platform through which academics can communicate with wider audiences. However, research indicates there are clear differences between certain subject communities in how effectively this happens. Marina Della Giusta describes how economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer conversations with strangers, and use less accessible language with more abbreviations and a more distant […]
More room for greater depth and detail: implications for academic research of Twitter’s expanded character limit
Twitter makes its data available in real-time and at no cost, making it a popular data source for many academic researchers. Wasim Ahmed discusses some of the implications of the decision to expand the character limit from 140 to 280. Greater space makes for greater depth and detail, addressing the difficulties of interpretation that 140-character tweets would sometimes present. However, […]
Do we (mis)recognise the political power of Twitter?
We are told that Twitter is the new public sphere, the place where we hold government accountable, encourage diverse voices, and provide resources for public benefit like education, healthcare, and welfare. Using the #metoo campaign as a case study, Naomi Barnes and Huw Davies question whether Twitter really is a public sphere or if it is simply a platform capitalist […]
2017 in review: round-up of our top posts on communicating your research with social media
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 […]