Do we need a new social medium for science?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010170
Christie Wilcox is a PhD student in biology at the University of Hawaii. She also writes the Science Sushi blog for Scientific American, which is where I stumbled across a provocative series of posts that she wrote last October. Under the title “Social media for scientists” , Wilcox urged scientists to blog, tweet, and use other social media to engage the interest of both the general public and their fellow scientists.
Wilcox made several arguments to support her call to action. By using social media, scientists could help raise the public’s low level of scientific knowledge. They could communicate directly with the people who ultimately pay for—and in some cases benefit from—their research without relying on the dwindling ranks of science journalists. And they could provide the general public with a more rounded, appealing impression of who scientists are and what they do.
Even if scientists don’t want to engage the general public, they should still use social media to tell the world about their research. Here’s a quote from the third part of Wilcox’s series:
Science is a labor of love. You do what you do because you think it matters, and you publish your research because you think it’s worth talking about. What better way to make sure your research is talked about than to start the conversation?
Just ask Peter Janiszewski, of Obesity Panacea . Last year, he and his colleague published a fascinating paper in the prestigious journal Diabetes Care. The problem was, it went unnoticed. For three months, his study wasn’t blogged about. It wasn’t picked up by the press. No one seemed to care.
But Peter cared. He decided that the paper fit well into his blog’s theme, and wrote a 5-part series on the topic of metabolically-healthy obesity, the final post of which was a discussion of his recently published paper.
The series was a hit. Peter’s blog posts received over 12,000 pageviews and more than 70 comments from readers during the week of the series. As Peter recounts, “Put another way, the same research which I published in a prestigious medical journal and made basically no impact, was then viewed by over 12,000 sets of eyes because I decided to discuss it online.” A few days later, an article about his study was published on MSNBC.com.
Wilcox anticipated that some of her scientist readers would claim that they don’t have time to blog and tweet. Fine, she wrote: Ask your colleagues to share the load. As for whether the public would visit a scientist’s blog or follow his or her tweets, Wilcox countered that even a popular audience of just three people is better than zero, which is the audience scientists get when they do nothing.
Too many, too infrequent
I agree with Wilcox that scientists should talk to and listen to the public without the mediation of journalists, editors, and science show presenters. I’m skeptical, however, that the current set of social media provides truly effective tools for promoting dialog between scientists and the public.
For one thing, too many scientists work on the same topics. Last year Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B published 634 papers on graphene between them. Even if each group published a productive six papers each, the prodigious total still implies there are more than 100 graphene groups.
Should each of those groups start a blog? Despite graphene being one of the hottest topics in physics, I doubt the public has the appetite for 100 blogs about the material. Granted, many of the blogs would be in Chinese, German, and other languages. Still, even 10 graphene blogs are likely to be too many.
Another problem with scientists using social media is that the pace of scientific research is far slower than the customary—and therefore expected—rate of tweeting, blogging, and Facebook posting. A typical scientist faces the dilemma of either tweeting often about incremental, even trivial advances, or rarely about real advances. Neither option will attract readers.
What’s missing, I think, is a social medium that lets scientists and the general public converse in a way that’s convenient and rewarding for both groups. Current social media don’t meet that need because they mediate communication between specific individuals. Members of the public who are interested in, say, particle physics can’t easily follow or subscribe to that topic. They have to either choose particle physicists to read or set up news filters that may or may not find prime particle physics content.
Fortunately, there is a social medium that could serve as model for a forum where scientists and the general public could converse: the arXiv e-print server . Imagine a website where scientists upload not preprints, as they do on arXiv, but accessible, easy-to-read descriptions of the their latest research. Imagine that the website has an interface that lets members of the public browse, search, collect, and share posts that interest them. Imagine, too, that the website makes it easy for scientists and members of the public to exchange comments.
If such a website existed, a scientist who produced one brilliant, quirky, or otherwise interesting piece of research per year could engage members of the public without having to set up and maintain a Twitter account or blog. Members of the public would get to see the fruits of scientific research without having to watch the fruits grow.
So what should we call this site and who should build it?