Scientists on Twitter: Q&A with authors of Twitter’s most popular article

Last year the article Scientists on Twitter: Preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops? ranked #38 out of 2.8 million most popular scholarly articles scored by Altmetrics. The paper, published in the open access journal FACETS, has an Altmetrics score of 3460—a value determined by the study’s impact on news, policy, and social media. The paper has been tweeted about over 10,000 times.

The study sought to determine how many Twitter followers a researcher needs to expand their following beyond other scientists. Although many researchers were aware of Twitter, it was unknown whether their work was reaching beyond the ivory tower and to members of the media, general public, or policy-makers.

By analyzing data from more than 100 scientists on Twitter and their followers, study authors Emily Darling and Isabelle Côté found that beyond a threshold of around 1000 followers, the audience diversity expands well beyond other scientists. The paper concludes that tweeting does in fact have the potential to carry out scientific outreach to a non-scientific audience—researchers just need to keep tweeting.

Emily Darling, Conservation Scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society, and Isabelle Côté, Professor of Marine Ecology at Simon Fraser University, authors of one of the most popular academic articles shared on Twitter. (Photo | Isabelle Côté)

Isabelle Côté on using Twitter for scientific outreach. Audio courtesy of Isabelle Côté.

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Here, Emily Darling, a Conservation Scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society, and Isabelle Côté, Professor of Marine Ecology at Simon Fraser University, discuss their tremendously popular article and their own experiences and advice on Twitter.

Congratulations on placing #38 on the Altmetrics most popular articles list! Were you surprised when you found out?

Isabelle: Yes. Certainly it was not on my radar—I don’t think it was on Emily’s radar either. We knew it made a bit of a splash, but we might expect that on Twitter about a paper that’s about Twitter.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s fabulous that we’re starting to value different papers for their impact in lots of different ways—whether that’s an impact in the scientific literature, an impact on society and communication, or an impact on how scientists communicate and value communication. I was certainly surprised too.

Why do you think this article resonated with so many people?

Emily: For me, I think scientists like quantifying things. We like counting and measuring our impact, and social media lets us do that in different ways, whether that’s the in number of followers, retweets, or likes.

We tried to ask the very simple questions of “How many followers does it take to have an impact? And how many followers do you need to have an impact beyond other scientists?” I think that’s something that scientists are interested in because they can measure it around the number of followers, but also because we’re seeing scientists increasingly want to have an impact for broader society. We know the world is changing fast, we know that we have information to help us steer in a different direction, and I think we all believe that science communication can play a part in that.

Isabelle: I think our paper can be ammunition for people who do communication and use social media and who are trying to convince other people to do the same. It was useful in terms of convincing people that there was some value to using something like Twitter to share science.

To give you a little anecdote, a couple weeks ago I was out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and there was a senior scientist who was one of those people who was unconvinced. He’s really a numbers guy so I showed him the study. As soon as he got off the boat he signed up. (laughs)

Now Isabelle has 6674 followers and Emily has 6241 (at time of publication). That’s quite a lot! How did you come to grow such a big Twitter following?

Isabelle: Ha ha, by publishing papers on Twitter? Just kidding.

I think things really took off when I was teaching a scientific diving course and one of my students found a camera underwater. I tweeted about this and about the number of invertebrates that had settled on the camera. Then, we recovered the memory card and I tweeted the photographs, which led to someone identifying them. The whole thing kind of played out on Twitter. I think I was accumulating followers really slowly but that was an exponential increase all of a sudden.

Emily: I have no idea why I have so many followers. I certainly don’t have any newsworthy stories like Isabelle. I think it’s just a concerted effort over time. I try to tweet things that I’m interested in and try to think about how the tweets I’m writing can be accessible to a broad audience. I’m looking at whether it’s something interesting or surprising, whether it links to things or photos.

I think Isabelle and I kind of captured two different trajectories of ways that people can gain a lot of followers. One is slow and steady and a concerted effort and trying to communicate things that are accessible and interesting and the other is taking advantage of these step-jumps where something really interesting happens. You can pick up a lot of followers in that one event. In our paper we found the more tweets you have, the more followers you have.

I think our advice to other scientists is to be really continue to tweet and think about what you’re tweeting to the audience you’re trying to reach. People are going to find you interesting and follow you to see what you’re going to say next.

Isabelle: The key is to keep going. Keeping sharing and the followers follow.

Above a threshold of around 1000 followers, scientists on Twitter expand their following beyond other scientists and to members of the public, media, and policy-makers. Graphic courtesy of Isabelle Côté.

How often do you tweet?

Isabelle: Irregularly. I tweet when I have something to say or announce, I rarely send out what I’d call a frivolous tweet. I feel like each tweet has a purpose.

Emily: Same, I certainly echo what Isabelle said.

There are a lot of scientists on Twitter and there’s a lot of really interesting and rich information. I think I maybe tweet new tweets a little bit less these days and instead try to retweet and amplify stories that I think bring a new perspective that are worth other people reading.

One of the other things I’m really passionate about is the role of being in the field with scientists and what we do in our day job. There’s the idea that coding is really important as a scientist these days, so I try to retweet a lot of the interesting things we find about our coding. We share pictures and stories of what it’s like to be a scientist in these ecosystems and what it looks like to count corals or fish. Scientists are doing this all over the world. I think those are all facets of science that maybe the general public doesn’t always see. They think of scientists in white coats and laboratories, so I think trying to show a diversity of ways that scientists engage with the world and engage with society is something really powerful that social media can show.

How did you two come together to do this study?

Emily: There was an interest in our research group on seeing how we could use Twitter as a social media channel for science communication and that was where our interests came together–not a lot of people knew about Twitter. They thought it was a waste of time or didn’t know what it would actually do.

One of the first papers that Isabelle and I wrote about Twitter was because of a tweet. An editor from a journal, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, tweeted and said “If there’s anyone interested in thinking about how scientists use Twitter, let me know!”

Isabelle and I were together in the field diving at the time and we thought “this is kind of interesting.” And then two other people, David Schiffman and Joshua Drew, replied, and the four of us met on Twitter and ended up writing this paper—a perspective on how Twitter can be useful in the life cycle of a scientific paper.

That was one of the first, but then we realized there’s this wealth of information, of quantifiable measures and metrics and numbers on Twitter. Isabelle and I wanted to keep asking those questions. I’ll let Isabelle talk about how we came up with this paper.

Isabelle: It just came down to that first paper really. It was just one of these opportunities.

One of the things we were hearing from people was, “Well this is great, Twitter is useful in a scientific paper, but who are you actually reaching? Who’s reading these tweets? You’re just sending something out into the black hole.” That led to the question, “Well how many followers does it take to reach out?” and we realized we could mine Twitter for information about who is following scientists.

Emily did some google searching and found a Twitter data company that had access to the Twitter API feed so we were able to work with them to identify about 100 scientists and then they batch downloaded all of the Twitter bios for each user who followed that scientist. That was the raw information that we then used to process through R (a computer program for statistical analysis). We tried to bin each bio—were they another scientist, did they have a more applied focus like a zoo or aquarium, or are they a decision-maker like a politician.

Do you have more research on social media outreach in the pipeline?

Isabelle: We don’t have anything immediately, but we are looking for a new question to occur to us.

Emily: I certainly hope it will! I love writing papers with Isabelle. It always starts with such an interesting and focused question that seems simple but really opens a bigger realization on the world. That’s the type of curiosity that I certainly love pursuing as a scientist, and I think that’s what people who are in the general public also are interested about as well. What’s new, what’s interesting, and taking a scientific approach to how do scientists and society interact with technology, with the digital world, and social media These are all things that have changed a lot in our lifetimes and it keeps changing. I think it’s great to keep understanding how scientists are interacting with them and how that can help us share our stories.

Why did you choose to publish with FACETS?

Isabelle: We really wanted to go open access and I think both Emily and I have published open access before. I was actually approached to be the first Editor-in-Chief and I was too scared so I said no. It’s been on my radar since then. The cool thing about FACETS is that it has a science communication section so I felt like our paper was perfect for that.

Do you have other advice for researchers that would like to communicate through social media?

Isabelle: Twitter may not be the platform for everybody so I’d recommend trying out different things. In my lab we’ve had Facebook and I tried Instagram, and those platforms weren’t good for me, but they were good for other things. Twitter is really one of many different avenues that exist out there. It may not be right for an individual, but maybe Facebook or Instagram is.

Emily: My advice would be to experiment and to find your own voice. I think one of the fabulous things about social media is that we’re able to listen to a diversity of voices through all these different channels, and everyone has different perspectives on their work, their world, and their impact on society. Don’t feel like you need to do something that’s already been done. Feel free to experiment, to be your own voice, to be genuine. And there are going to be people who really benefit from hearing that, want to hear that and will follow you on Twitter.