Jason Priem, Kaitlin Costello, and Tyler Dzuba, graduate students from UNC, examined Twitter usage for over 8000 scholars from five American and British universities.
The results? Sorry Twitter. Scholars are just not that into you.
Read more:
3 thoughts on “Surprise: Twitter unpopular with scholars”
Comments are closed.
BioMed 2.0 
Interesting, but I’m a little unsure of the validity of their argument. Two thoughts:
1) They seem to be saying that using Twitter is the same as posting on Twitter. However, I think a lot of people (scholars or not) probably follow Twitter feeds without ever posting. Does this detract from its value?
2) I’m not sure how they are reporting on who is “not on Twitter”. They eliminated so many unknown Twitter handles that it seems overwhelmingly likely that many of their subjects arr using the system, just not that easily identified (they even say that their number is an undercount). So, the box in the upper left seems questionable to me.
Overall, I see this data as showing that more scholars are starting to use Twitter. Instead of being “not that into you”, I think they are just shy and a bit awkward right now….But given time it could still bloom into romance!
I agree with Peter. I know of a couple of scientists who use Twitter as a search engine and “alert system” without ever posting something. For example, they tell me that it’s faster than browsing individual journal websites.
Doesn’t suprise me really, I had Twitter for years without actually posting anything on it. Good for sharing content with readers though 🙂