Étiquette : social media

Publié le

“Giving them the best information I could with whatever I had at hand”. Physicians’ online health communication practices in a post-normal science context

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Alice Fleerackers,  Lauren A. Maggio

This study describes US-based physicians’ online public communication practices, particularly on the social media platform Twitter/X, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on 28 semi-structured interviews to examine how they responded to the unique COVID-19 context with respect to each of the four features of post-normal science (PNS): facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent.

Our analysis reveals that the pandemic shifted what, why, and how physicians used the platform, and with whom they aimed to communicate. We discuss the implications of these changes in their online communication habits, discourses, and representations around social media as a reaction to the context of PNS brought about by the pandemic.

URL : “Giving them the best information I could with whatever I had at hand”. Physicians’ online health communication practices in a post-normal science context

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.23060204

Publié le

Le groupe Facebook La Bibliothèque Solidaire du confinement. Circulations et médiatisations numériques des contenus et des pratiques savantes en temps de pandémie

Auteur.ices/Authors : Muriel Amar, Julien Hage

Le groupe Facebook La Bibliothèque Solidaire du confinement (Bsc) constitue un dispositif de production relationnelle qui couple une production de relation – courtage documentaire entre demandeurs de documents et propriétaires de documents – à une production par la relation : les échanges de fichiers donnent lieu à un écosystème de pratiques conversationnelles qui motive une présence dans le groupe nourrie par une constante attention médiatique comme à la volonté « d’en être » et de s’identifier à lui et à ses topoï.

En dehors de toute dimension marchande, la Bsc et ses échanges manifestent une valeur d’usage scientifique, une valeur de partage relationnelle et une valeur patrimoniale : c’est bien toute la dimension de bien « culturel » ou « symbolique » du livre que la plateforme met en mouvement, dans le cadre d’une économie morale de la science imposée par le contexte pandémique.

URL : https://intelligibilite-numerique.numerev.com/numeros/n-5-2024/2913-le-groupe-facebook-la-bibliotheque-solidaire-du-confinement-circulations-et-mediatisations-numeriques-des-contenus-et-des-pratiques-savantes-en-temps-de-pandemie

Publié le

Who Are Tweeting About Academic Publications? A Cochrane Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Altmetric Studies

Authors : Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg

Previous studies have developed different categorizations of Twitter users who interact with scientific publications online, reflecting the difficulty in creating a unified approach. Using Cochrane Review meta-analysis to analyse earlier research (including 79,014 Twitter users, over twenty million tweets, and over five million tweeted publications from 23 studies), we created a consolidated robust categorization consisting of 11 user categories, at different dimensions, covering most of any future needs for user categorizations on Twitter and possibly also other social media platforms.

Our findings showed, with moderate certainty, covering all the earlier different approaches employed, that the predominant Twitter group was individual users (66%), responsible for the majority of tweets (55%) and tweeted publications (50%), while organizations (22%, 27%, and 28%, respectively) and science communicators (16%, 13%, and 30%) clearly contributed smaller proportions.

The cumulative findings from prior investigations indicated a statistically equal extent of academic individuals (33%) and other individuals (28%). While academic individuals shared more academic publications than other individuals (42% vs. 31%), they posted fewer tweets overall (22% vs. 30%), but these differences do not reach statistical significance.

Despite significant heterogeneity arising from variations in categorization methods, the findings consistently indicate the importance of academics in disseminating academic publications.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06399

Publié le

Clickbait or conspiracy? How Twitter users address the epistemic uncertainty of a controversial preprint

Authors : Mareike Bauer, Maximilian Heimstädt, Carlos Franzreb, Sonja Schimmler

Many scientists share preprints on social media platforms to gain attention from academic peers, policy-makers, and journalists. In this study we shed light on an unintended but highly consequential effect of sharing preprints: Their contribution to conspiracy theories. Although the scientific community might quickly dismiss a preprint as insubstantial and ‘clickbaity’, its uncertain epistemic status nevertheless allows conspiracy theorists to mobilize the text as scientific support for their own narratives.

To better understand the epistemic politics of preprints on social media platforms, we studied the case of a biomedical preprint, which was shared widely and discussed controversially on Twitter in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, we compared the structures of engagement with the preprint and the discursive practices of scientists and conspiracy theorists.

We found that despite substantial engagement, scientists were unable to dampen the conspiracy theorists’ enthusiasm for the preprint. We further found that members from both groups not only tried to reduce the preprint’s epistemic uncertainty but sometimes deliberately maintained it.

The maintenance of epistemic uncertainty helped conspiracy theorists to reinforce their group’s identity as skeptics and allowed scientists to express concerns with the state of their profession.

Our study contributes to research on the intricate relations between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online, as well as the role of social media platforms for new genres of scholarly communication.

URL : Clickbait or conspiracy? How Twitter users address the epistemic uncertainty of a controversial preprint

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231180575

Publié le

Interdisciplinary Analysis of Science Communication on Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

Authors : Thomas Mandl, Sylvia Jaki, Hannah Mitera, Franziska Schmidt

In times of crisis, science communication needs to be accessible and convincing. In order to understand whether these two criteria apply to concrete science communication formats, it is not enough to merely study the communication product. Instead, the recipient’s perspective also needs to be taken into account.

What do recipients value in popular science communication formats concerning COVID-19? What do they criticize? What elements in the formats do they pay attention to? These questions can be answered by reception studies, for example, by analyzing the reactions and comments of social media users.

This is particularly relevant since scientific information was increasingly disseminated over social media channels during the COVID-19 crisis. This interdisciplinary study, therefore, focuses both on science communication strategies in media formats and the related comments on social media.

First, we selected science communication channels on YouTube and performed a qualitative multi-modal analysis. Second, the comments responding to science communication content online were analyzed by identifying Twitter users who are doctors, researchers, science communicators and those who represent research institutes and then, subsequently, performing topic modeling on the textual data.

The main goal was to find topics that directly related to science communication strategies. The qualitative video analysis revealed, for example, a range of strategies for accessible communication and maintaining transparency about scientific insecurities.

The quantitative Twitter analysis showed that few tweets commented on aspects of the communication strategies. These were mainly positive while the sentiment in the overall collection was less positive.

We downloaded and processed replies for 20 months, starting at the beginning of the pandemic, which resulted in a collection of approximately one million tweets from the German science communication market.

URL : Interdisciplinary Analysis of Science Communication on Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge3010008

Publié le

The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset

Author : Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher

Twitter harbours dense networks of academics, but to what extent do scientific journals use that platform? This article introduces a dataset of 3,485 Twitter accounts pertaining to a sample of 13,821 journals listed in Web of Science’s three major indices (SCIE, SSCI and AHCI).

The summary statistics indicate that 25.2% of the journals have a dedicated Twitter presence. This number is likely to grow, as, on average, every one and a half days sees yet another journal setting up a new profile. The share of Twitter presence, however, varies strongly by publisher and discipline.

The most active discipline is political science, which has almost 75% of its journals on Twitter, while other research categories have zero. The median account issues 116 messages a year and it interacts with distinct other users once in two to three Tweets. Approximately 600 journals refer to themselves as ‘peer-reviewed’, while 263 journals refer to their citation-based impact (like the impact factor) in their profile description.

All in all, the data convey immense heterogeneity with respect to the Twitter behaviour of scientific journals. As there are numerous deceptive Twitter profile names established by predatory publishers, it is recommended that journals establish their official accounts lest bogus journals mislead the public about scientific findings. The dataset is available for use for further scientometric analyses.

URL : The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.593

Publié le

Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field

Authors : Chung-hong Chan, Jing Zeng, Mike S. Schäfer

Twitter has become an important promotional tool for scholarly work, but individual academic publications have varied degrees of visibility on the platform. We explain this variation through the concept of Twitter-worthiness: factors making certain academic publications more likely to be visible on Twitter.

Using publications from communication studies as our analytical case, we conduct statistical analyses of 32187 articles spanning 82 journals. Findings show that publications from G12 countries, covering social media topics and published open access tend to be mentioned more on Twitter.

Similar to prior studies, this study demonstrates that Twitter mentions are associated with peer citations. Nevertheless, Twitter also has the potential to reinforce pre-existing disparities between communication research communities, especially between researchers from developed and less-developed regions. Open access, however, does not reinforce such disparities.

URL : Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278840