This document summarizes a PhD student's pilot study on using social media for scholarly communication. The student conducted an internet survey and interviews with academic researchers who do and do not use social media. Preliminary findings suggest that Twitter, blogs, and Facebook are commonly used to find and disseminate information, build communities, and network. However, some researchers cite lack of time and concerns about reputation as barriers. The student plans to expand the study with more comprehensive surveys and interviews to obtain a representative sample.

1.  Yimei Zhu
Sociology PhD Student
 University of Manchester
 Twitter: @yimeizhu
 www.facebook.com/yimeizhumanchester
 http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com

2.  Introduction

 Background
 What’s the question now and what can be done?
 Methods
 Results and Discussion
 Conclusion and future work

3.  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.

4.  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).

5.  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., Vos
s, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M. (2010b). Adoption and use of Web
2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society A, 368(1926).

6.  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.

7.  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

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

9.  Shall we use social media for our research?

10.  Interviews:
 By face-to-face, Skype and Emails
 Participant observation

11.  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

12.  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.

13.  Current most commonly used social media
sites for research-related purpose:
 Blog sites (e.g.,WordPress), Twitter, Facebook
groups and pages

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

15.  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)

16.  Build a community and support network:
 Share useful resources
 Offer advices and feedbacks

17.  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)

18.  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)

19.  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.

20.  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)

21.  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

22.  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)

23.  ‘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).

24.  Examples:
 Twitter #phdchat network
 (one hour chat every Wednesday 7.30-8.30
UK time)

26.  Facebook Group: UoM Sociology PhD
 Blog network

27.  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

28.  ‘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)

29.  ‘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

30.  Link your blog to other popular blog
 Using anonymity and pseudonym

31.  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.

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

33.  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

37.  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.

38.  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

39.  An internet survey with UK academic
researchers to obtain a representative sample
 More follow-up-interviews and participant
observation after the survey

40.  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).

42.  Follow me @yimeizhu