Science and Social Media: a Guide for Scientists in the Hyper-connected Era

Social media as like as Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus gather hundreds of millions of users worldwide, including scientists and science students. Moreover, social media have turned into a thriving environment suitable for scientist-to-scientist and scientist-to-public communication. Some scientific Journals have already decided to track social media engagement around published research articles through online services (e.g. Altmetric), even though metrics analysis alone cannot evaluate the real impact of scientific papers on the broader audience yet. Public discussion on social media is not a “one-way” interaction anymore. A social media user can freely interact with public profiles of research institutions and scientists, which leads them towards the urgent need of building solid social media presences. On the other hand, social media represent valuable resources for science, too. Citizens network can help scientists in tracking the behavior of particular insects (e.g. Cicada Tracker), delocalising data elaboration from research centers to private home computers (e.g. LHC@home) and testing new stereochemical geometries for proteins by playing video games (e.g. Foldit). Scientists have also access to professional social networks dedicated to knowledge transfer such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Besides sharing papers, resources, protocols and scientific information, scientists can also turn to new networks designed to share tools and laboratory equipment (e.g. Quartzy). Moreover, companies running social media have moved to science as well. Data scientists at Facebook are conducting “emotion manipulation” studies on ~700,000 users, altering algorithms running the News Feed in order to evaluate reactions to prevalent positive/negative news updates. Finally, open access to data from public funded research is often being granted as a consequence of new European policies. How will science evolve inside this unprecedented scenario? How will scientists and science students approach new communication technologies wisely?