Hi David, Let me preface this by saying I am not active on social media. The extent of my presence is a mostly inactive Facebook account that is more personal than professional. However, I fully recognize that I am increasingly in the minority. Many of my colleagues tweet/Facebook/blog/Reddit about their work regularly, and they have urged me to reconsider my lack of presence. It is not a coincidence that they are much better known than I am in our scientific community. Many of them hold prestigious postdoctoral or faculty positions at some of the US and Europe’s best institutions, and they both conduct and publish rigorous, worthwhile science. Dismissing social media metrics is an outdated and arguably elitist approach. Communication changes, and in this case I think it is changing for the better. These platforms help scientists reach a much broader audience, and spark interest in topics that previously went largely unexplored outside small groups of specialists. Most of take public funding—hence your reference to Congress—and we have a responsibility to make our work more accessible and more public. Using social media platforms as a metric of scientific visibility is perfectly reasonable, and a complement to more traditional metrics that are (at least theoretically) designed to quantify quality. It’s a sign that the scientific establishment might be making a bit of headway in demonstrating its relevance to a wider audience.
Cheers, Stacy Stacy Rosenbaum NSF Postdoctoral Fellow Davee Center for Epidemiology and Endocrinology Lincoln Park Zoo Ph: 312-742-2250 srosenb...@lpzoo.org<mailto:srosenb...@lpzoo.org> On Apr 15, 2015, at 4:49 PM, David Duffy <ddu...@hawaii.edu<mailto:ddu...@hawaii.edu>> wrote: While perusing an abstract in "Nature this week" , http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7547/full/520266d.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150416 I found a button to click called "Article Metrics". Once clicked, I found it had three different metrics: 1. citations (zero as the article is brand new, but likely to be frequent in the future), an alimetric score apparently based on 9 tweets and one reddit, and a map of Twitter "demographics" (n = 5). The alimetric score " is calculated based on two main sources of online attention: social media and mainstream news media". Citations have their problems as a growing literature documents, but turning over judgement of quality to Twitter and Reddit suggests Nature is pandering to the standards society uses to judge the Kardasians, Miley Cyrus and Prince Harry in Las Vegas. And we want Congress and the public to take science seriously? David Duffy -- David Duffy 戴大偉 (Dài Dàwěi) Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit Botany University of Hawaii 3190 Maile Way Honolulu Hawaii 96822 USA 1-808-956-8218
