Yimei Zhu

Sociology PhD Student

University of Manchester Twitter: @yimeizhu

www.facebook.com/yimeizhumanchester http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com

The Co-Production of Knowledge SymposiumUniversity of York18-20 July 2012

Shall we use social media for our research?

Introduction Background

What’s the question now and what can be done?

Methods

Results and Discussion

Conclusion and future work

Presentation Outline

My PhD thesis:

Are the new forms of scholarly communication the pathway to open science?

Open access to publication Open access to research data Using social media for scholarly communication

This paper I’m presenting today is focused on using social media for scholarly communication based on a pilot study I’ve conducted with a number of UK based academic researchers.

Introduction

Scholarly communication, has been used as a broad term to cover all the activities and norms of academic research related to producing, exchanging and disseminating knowledge (Rieger 2010; Hahn et al. 2011).

Scholarly communication

A study of the adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communication conducted 3 years ago with UK academic communities and publishers by internet survey, interviews and case studies:

Procter, R., Williams, R. & Stewart, J. (2010a). If You Build It, Will They Come? How Researchers Perceive and Use Web 2.0. Research Information Network.

Procter, R., Williams, R., Stewart, J., Poschen, M., Snee, H., Voss, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M. (2010b). Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 368(1926).

Background study

What Procter et al (2010a) found: Only 4% write a research blog and 6% post

slides, text and videos publicly as frequent users.

39% of UK academics are non-users of Web 2.0.

The forms of current scholarly communication in the UK academia were strongly influenced by disciplinary and institutional norms and variance.

Background study

Some Questions to consider: Has the attitudes and practice changed in the last

three years? How has Twitter been used for scholarly

communication? what strategies can be employed to maximise the

impact of using social media? Is there any possible causal relations between

various variables and the researchers’ attitudes and practice

What can be done?

Pilot study Internet survey Follow-up interviews Social Network Analysis Participant observation

My plan

Shall we use social media for our research?

Research questions for this paper

Interviews: By face-to-face, Skype and Emails

Participant observation

Methods for the pilot study

Users: Male, Professor in Politics Male, Lecturer in Social Science Male, PhD student in Education Female, PhD student in Education Female, PhD student in Biology   Non-users: Male, Senior Lecturer in Music composing Male, PhD student in Politics Female, PhD student in Material

Engineering

Interviewees (4 Universities)

Talk to various researchers about their attitudes towards and experience of using social media

Created my own twitter account and academic blog, as well as joined a number of social media sites.

Participant observation

Current most commonly used social media sites for research-related purpose:

Blog sites (e.g.,WordPress), Twitter, Facebook groups and pages

Results and Discussion

Also used: Academia.edu,Pinterest,Mendeley, etc.

Finding information as well as disseminating information (Procter et al, 2010a)

‘Twitter – links, information, discussion. Blogs – dissemination, information.’(Male, PhD

student in Education)

‘I use blogs and Twitter to disseminate information about my research and that of my colleagues, to ask questions that will help my research, and to circulate news or articles within my fields of research.’ (Male, Professor in Politics)

What are they for?

Build a community and support network:

Share useful resources

Offer advices and feedbacks

What are they for?

Networking at a conference using Twitter hashtag （ e.g., #stssm)

‘Yes I use Twitter during a conference. I find it a useful way of meeting new useful contacts (via hashtags), sharing jokes, links etc. generally a positive experience.’ (Male, Lecturer in Social Science)

What are they for?

Get advice and feedback you otherwise won’t be able to get quickly

‘There have been a few occasions when I've asked a question, e.g. "Has anyone ever done a study of X", and some followers will message me with suggestions and reading. So that is a very quick way to do a literature review.’ (Male, Professor in Politics)

Benefits

Increase readership and thus citation

‘More readership will bring more citations. I think the xxx blog is regularly trying to prove this’. (Male, Professor in Politics)

Eysenbach (2011) found that disseminating publication information in twitter either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the published paper which also predicts citations.

Benefits

Danger of hurting reputation Eg., Inappropriate content linked to your

profile

Getting abused if publicly posting opinions about sensitive issues

Revealing too much personal information (eg., get students friends request)

Potential problem

Reason of not using social media: 1. No time 2. Don’t trust information online that are

not peer-reviewed 3. Isolation and self-deprecation 4. Don’t like anonymity 5. Prefer face-to-face or other traditional

communication methods 6. Lack of perceived value 7.Subject area or professional status

reasons

Non-user attitudes

Link different social media sites for cross-platform promotion.

‘I use my twitter network to promote my blog.’ (Male, Lecturer in Social Science)

‘Linking each site to one another so that they’re updated automatically… I set up WordPress link to my Twitter which is linked to my Facebook page…So I cover both bases separately. I used to post on Facebook and Twitter about my blog post. Once I set up the link on WordPress, it would just do it at once.’ (Female, PhD student in Education)

Strategies used by users

‘I use Buffer to automatically set tweets on twitter… Buffer is time saving. On Buffer, I can set up that I retweet it at 2, retweet that at 4…Buffer automatically tweets on my behalf. So people don’t have to spend a lot of time on social media, because some tool can do it for you automatically.’ (Female, PhD student in Education).

Use tools to manage social media sites

Examples:

Twitter #phdchat network (one hour chat every Wednesday 7.30-8.30

UK time)

Create a support network

Facebook Group: UoM Sociology PhD

Blog network

Create a support network

Creative commons license:

free to use and add to a blog site protect the copyright of the content on the

website tells people what they can do about it

Copyright protection

‘Twitter is professional, and Facebook is for personal, and there is very little (although increasing) overlap.’ (Male, Lecturer in Social Science)

Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, twitter to publicise my work.… At least 99% of my tweets are work/research-related.’ (Male, Professor in Politics)

Privacy issue: Have different identities on Twitter and Facebook

‘I’d only put online what I’m not ashamed of and willing to publicly defend.’ (Female, PhD student in Education).

Use blog as a reflective tool to think about the research and the process of doing research rather than revealing the findings

Cautious about the content on the social web

Link your blog to other popular blog

Using anonymity and pseudonym

Other strategies

In social sciences, the nature of research and their findings are very different from natural sciences which determine what can and can not be blogged about.

For example, for politics science, there are not many definitive findings.

Disciplinary differences

Does the use of social media have more potential benefits for early career researchers than for professors?

Career paths difference?

I started using Twitter last year and recently started my blog and Facebook Page

It was hard to gain followers (36 on Tue) Need technical support or help from

someone more experienced Don’t know what to tweet or blog about Don’t know the benefit of writing a blog

post

My reflection using blogs and twitter

Depends on who ‘we’ are—researchers at different disciplines and various stage of career paths have different needs.

It can be very helpful for early career researchers to raise their profiles to peers and an international audience.

It can be very useful for some discipline areas, such as politics, when the research aims to reach out quickly to a wider population of audience or to be picked up by the media.

Conclusion--Shall we use social media for our research?

Social Media can be beneficial for anyone who use it wisely.

Employ strategies—learn from colleagues and attend workshops

Learn by doing it Be careful about the content you put on the

social web Follow disciplinary/institutional norm—eg.,

not revealing findings too early

Depends on how we use it

An internet survey with UK academic researchers to obtain a representative sample

More follow-up-interviews and participant observation after the survey

Future Work

Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of medical Internet research, 13(4).

Hahn, T., Burright, M. & Duggan, H. (2011). Has the revolution in scholarly communication lived up to its promise? American Society for Information Science and Technology, 37(5), 5.

Merton, R. K. (1957). Priorities in scientific discovery: a chapter in the sociology of science. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 635-659.

Procter, R., Williams, R. & Stewart, J. (2010a). If You Build It, Will They Come? How Researchers Perceive and Use Web 2.0. Research Information Network. Available at www. rin. ac. uk/system/files/attachments/web_2. 0_screen. pdf [accessed 21 Dec 2011].

Procter, R., Williams, R., Stewart, J., Poschen, M., Snee, H., Voss, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M. (2010b). Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 368(1926).

Rieger, O. Y. (2010). Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship. First Monday, 15(10).

Reference

Thank you!

Any questions? Follow me @yimeizhu