Yesterday, we posted a couple of items from The Scholarly Kitchen with differing viewpoints about the use of social media and social networking. Read both posts factor in your personal experiences and then make up your own mind.

Today, an article from Cell discusses how some scientists are using Twitter.

Twitter needs no introduction. This “microblogging” service has gained tremendous popularity in the 2 years since its launch. Yet, most scientists are steering clear of it. Laura Bonetta speaks to some who have found value in tweeting.

One scientist who has found value in Twitter is Brent Stockwell, associate professor of biology and chemistry at Columbia University. “I use it to collect information from science newsfeeds and from various individuals,” he says. “It provides a single source where you can go to scan news and papers.”

There are many ways to stay abreast of research findings, including automated PubMed searches and Google alerts. But, says Stockwell, Twitter provides a unique way to hear about papers “tangentially related to what I am doing, so that they would not come up through my usual alerts, and not sufficiently high profile that I would read about them in The New York Times.

Much More After a Click

Disseminating scientific information is a driving mission for many Twitter users. “One thing everyone agrees with is that scientists have to learn to communicate their work to non-scientists. Twitter allows anyone to see science in a way that is more accessible, such as scientists reporting on their daily failures and successes,” says [Chris} Gunter. “In addition, many science writers are on Twitter and that is one place where they get their news tips. They can then write stories that educate and publicize science, and more accurately explain what scientists do to lay people.”

[Snip]

But short messages do pose some limitations. “It is a double-edged sword. The majority of my tweets are pointers to other resources, so there is a headline—an enticement in other words—and a link to the resource. You don’t need more than 140 characters for that,” says [David] Bradley. “However you cannot have a decent, full-blown, high-level scientific debate via text message, and Twitter is just the same.”

That limitation is one of the reasons that Jonathan Weissman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco, has stayed away from Twitter. “I could see something similar to Twitter might be useful as a way for a group of scientists to share information. To ask questions like ‘Does anyone have a good antibody?’ ‘How much does everyone pay for oligos?’ ‘Does anyone have experience with this technique?’” he says. But such discussions, he adds, could not be carried out with strict restrictions on text length

Source: Cell

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