Scientists on Twitter

This post on BrainFacts.org by Jean-François Gariépy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, raises several interesting issues.........

"Neil Hall from the Centre for Genomic Research, University of Liverpool, has published a very interesting mini-study on scientists and Twitter.  He developed a metric that compares the popularity of scientists on Twitter to the impact of their publications within peer-reviewed journals. The metric is called the Kardashian Index, a reference to the fact that Kim Kardashian became wildly popular for no apparent reason, and a wink at those scientists who get Twitter popularity without having accomplished as much as others in their scientific career. Neil Hall is not necessarily critiquing the individuals who use Twitter to their advantage – he simply creates a metric that finds discrepancies between Twitter popularity and scientific popularity. The idea is brilliant, but in my view the short article is based on an incorrect premise. The premise is that science and social media contributions are two fundamentally separate things that can be compared to each other............The view that emerges from the article is that what scientists do on Twitter is not science or education – it is self-promotion, shouting, or mindless small talk. I hope that sharing part of my experience on social media will convince you that this is wrong..."  Read on ...

..."we may want to recognize that, yes, science is now happening on Twitter too"...

..."some.....have found a way to disseminate their knowledge that does not always results in increasing the number of times their research gets quoted in the research articles of the next generation" ...

..."might want to consider that the number of times a researcher is quoted in future research is not a perfect representation of the value of ... contributions to science." 

..."we currently have intellectuals who teach, research and engage in a thought process in the public sphere, to the benefit of their followers, and academia has not yet found a way to evaluate and reward this part of their contribution to society"...