ResourceBlog Article: Yes or No: Are Scientists Using Social Media and/or Social Networks?

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Tuesday, 3rd November 2009

Yes or No: Are Scientists Using Social Media and/or Social Networks?

Two posts from The Scholarly Kitchen blog might be of interest to some of you.

1) About three weeks ago (10/19/2009), David Crotty posted that how scientists ARE NOT using social media.

[David] Bradley gives what I think are overly generous estimates of use of the sites, given the level of traffic one sees on most. Using sheer numbers of members is always problematic since so many people sign up, take a look around, and never return. Numbers of members actively posting in the last week/month are much more telling, but very few sites are willing to give out such data. Proponents of such networks argue that we’re still in early days and that eventually, membership will grow. Personally, I think that ship has already sailed, at least for the current set of offerings. The issue isn’t a lack of awareness of social networks–who hasn’t heard of Myspace or Facebook?–but instead is a lack of compelling reasons to participate.

2) Today (11/3/2009), Kent Anderson reports that scientists ARE using social media and in some cases social networks.

In an analysis published in the October 30th issue of Cell, Laura Bonetta quotes a number of scientists who are using Twitter to broadcast awareness of papers they find interesting while learning about papers others find interesting. Most of those quoted have 1,000+ followers. In addition, scientists Bonetta found are Twittering from meetings to help peers follow along...t seems there’s plenty of evidence that scientists are using social networks (from general ones like Facebook and LinkedIn to more specialized ones like Academia.edu and others), as well as social media tools, from blogs to Twitter to RSS.

We included just two brief passages from each post. You make the call after reading both of them.

Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

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Web 2.0 (ResourceShelf)

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