Social media and research workflow

Abstract

Key findings 1 Social media have found serious application at all points of the research lifecycle. The three most popular social media tools in a research setting are those for collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings. 2 Awareness of social media among members of the research community is high, but there is a large gap between awareness and actual use for the majority of tools. 3 Researchers in business, health, the biosciences, and the arts and humanities are less likely to use social media professionally than their peers in other parts of the academy. 4 Researchers under 35 are generally more likely to use at least one social media application than the over-35s. This finding is a broad generalization of a much more complex picture when we look at specific tools, which show strikingly different patterns of take up by age. We should be very careful indeed of applying `digital native’ narratives to social media. As we have said many times before, the future is now! 5 Age is in fact a rather poor predictor of social media use in a research context. Rogers’ well-known model of technology adoption offers a far better explanation for take up: innovators and early adopters are 1.26 times more likely to use social media professionally. 6 Professional users of social media are 1.68 times more likely to use a smartphone or other mobile device than non-users; and 2.11 times more likely to use an iPad. This is consistent with the previous key finding. 7 Researchers are using social media tools to support every phase of the research lifecycle: from identifying research opportunities to disseminating findings at the end. They may not be the same tools, and they are certainly not the same researchers, but social media are most definitely making an impact on scholarly workflow. 8 The most popular tools used in a professional research context tend to be mainstream anchor technologies or `household brands’, like Skype, Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube. Researchers seem to be largely appropriating generic tools rather than using specialist or custom-built solutions and both publishers and librarians need to adapt to this reality. Is this a sign, perhaps, that there may be a gap in the market for simple bespoke tools? 9 The key driver for the take up of social media is pressure exerted by peers outside of the researcher’s own institution. Social media are helping to fulfill the demand for cheap, instant communication between researchers fuelled by the growth of collaborative and interdisciplinary research. 10 Use of social media is usually down to personal initiative, so a clear understanding of the capabilities and benefits of these tools is essential. Time-poor researchers are still unclear about the benefits of social media and this represents a major barrier to their take up. They also have serious concerns about the authenticity of crowd- sourced information. 11 Users and non-users of social media express almost identical preferences when they look for scholarly information. Their first preference is for the open web, followed by searching licensed e- content through their libraries, followed by asking a colleague. The only difference we could detect in this survey between users and non-users is that the former are more likely to put out a general call for information on a list serv or social network. 12 We find a similar pattern with regard to research dissemination. The traditional channels (especially journals, conference proceedings and edited books) are greatly and equally favoured by both social media users and non-users over informal channels such as blogs. Researchers continue to back dissemination routes that they know and trust. It is clear that social media users see informal tools as a complement to the existing system of scholarly publishing, not as a replacement. As a result, personal dissemination is on a steep upward curve, with implications for publishers especially. 13 Researchers, especially senior researchers, want above all for publishers to make content readable on all platforms. This, together with more progress in linking articles to their underlying data. They want the basics to work well, not more `bells and whistles’. 14 Researchers also sent a clear message to librarians. At the top of their wish list, and by a big margin, is a desire to be able to search across the full text of all locally-held licensed e-content using a simple interface like Google. This is seen as a much greater potential benefit than libraries moving into the social media space by offering users, for example, an opportunity to socially tag the library catalogue.