(Mis)communicating science

ISTOCKPHOTO/THINKSTOCK

Of the three post-doctoral fellowships I recently submitted, one surprisingly had a large focus on knowledge translation, the plan for communicating the study, its purpose, and eventually its results to various communities including both scientific and general.

Within the last week the issue of science communication was raised in two different tweets:

The point when science becomes publicity from @mjsutterer
and
100 Most followed Psychologists on Twitter from @AkiNikolaidis

The first article discusses a recent retrospective study that might be best summed by Public Enemy:

with the authors concluding that over-exaggerations in news coverage of scientific articles is more likely to occur when the press release from the university includes exaggerations. Both the article and an accompanying editorial state the importance of the press release in communicating science to a broader audience. But this article comes at an interesting time where scientists have more avenues than ever to communicate directly with the public, including twitter, facebook, reddit, and personal blogs and scientists are even encouraging other scientists to get out and tweet (here and here).

This push of scientists to toward twitter made me really interested in the second article published by the British Psychological Society listing the 100 most followed psychologists and neuroscientists on twitter. I have previously posted about science and twitter and I wanted to conduct a similar study with these 100 psychology twitter accounts. Before starting, I thought the process would be easier than it ultimately ended being. First, finding an individual authors total citation count is almost impossible. I used the Scopus database and already know that I am likely underestimating and certainly missing citation counts (my own citation count on Scopus is underestimated by 33%). Other metrics are also very difficult to get ahold of when searching in 100 different places. So before presenting the data, I realize that much of it is somewhat off (Twitter counts are old, citation counts likely only from Elsevier based journals, and other information only from what I could easily find and discern from webpages). 

Turning to the data, while many citation accounts are missing, there appears to be almost no relationship between academic impact and twitter followers. As I collected the data, I started to wonder, what does account for increases in twitter followers. I've started to think of a few other influences (I'm ignoring twit-iquet, as that has been discussed a number of times before, here and here for example) that may increase follower account. On the google doc I've linked, I'm hoping others can help fill in the blanks and perhaps explain how and why psychologists can best communicate with the public. I'll be tweeting a link to the google doc and the image below to the 100 accounts to see if I can fill in the information and see if anyone can propose other possible influences.

Mixing science with community

In days gone by, the only way for a scientist to come to national attention was through an amazing scientific breakthrough, a career of outstanding work (that normally culminated in an award of national prominence) or through a major mistake (e.g., ethics breaches, data fabrication, plagiarism, scientific misconduct). Today scientists can work to make connections with a wider audience than the handful of post-docs and graduate students that comb through esoteric journals through social media. While many scientists have excitedly taken up Twitter,  I recently stumbled on this paper

The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists 

Neil Hall

The author states that while social media plays an important role in outreach, there is a danger in it gaining too high a value, surpassing traditional measures of scientific value like citation indicies. To me Twitter is more about bringing in information than putting information out. It serves as a great aggregator of up-to-the second news and information as well as longer forms of formal and informal scientific inquiry both within and outside your specific field. Twitter has also proved invaluable at conferences for social networking and socializing.

This infographic from katiephd.com does a great job giving insight into the role of twitter in science today

Though on a more serious note, direct communication between scientists and the public is useful, especially when research/topics are controversial or not well understood. However, a recent study from Pew Research Center has indicated in a survey that people with dissenting views (or less popular views) actually participate less in discussions on-line. Interestingly, the study also revealed that people with less education were more likely to speak up. Moving forward, Twitter and other social media are not just for the distillation of science into manageable/understandable bits, so while some researchers may have more followers than they "should", sometimes its nice to just tell jokes.