Category: Social Media

Social Media Use Continues to Rise in Developing Countries but Plateaus Across Developed Ones

The Pew Research Center has released Social Media Use Continues to Rise in Developing Countries but Plateaus Across Developed Ones.

Here's an excerpt:

Across the 39 countries, a median of 75% say they either use the internet occasionally or own a smartphone, our definition of internet use. In many advanced economies, nine-in-ten or more use the internet, led by South Korea (96%). . . .

Across 39 countries, a median of 53% say they use online social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. However, that figure conceals large differences around the world, and the relationship between social media use and national wealth is not as strong as it is for overall internet use and smartphone ownership.

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"Academic Information on Twitter: A User Survey"

Ehsan Mohammadi et al. have published "Academic Information on Twitter: A User Survey" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Although counts of tweets citing academic papers are used as an informal indicator of interest, little is known about who tweets academic papers and who uses Twitter to find scholarly information. Without knowing this, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions from a publication being frequently tweeted. This study surveyed 1,912 users that have tweeted journal articles to ask about their scholarly-related Twitter uses. Almost half of the respondents (45%) did not work in academia, despite the sample probably being biased towards academics. Twitter was used most by people with a social science or humanities background. People tend to leverage social ties on Twitter to find information rather than searching for relevant tweets. Twitter is used in academia to acquire and share real-time information and to develop connections with others. Motivations for using Twitter vary by discipline, occupation, and employment sector, but not much by gender. These factors also influence the sharing of different types of academic information. This study provides evidence that Twitter plays a significant role in the discovery of scholarly information and cross-disciplinary knowledge spreading. Most importantly, the large numbers of non-academic users support the claims of those using tweet counts as evidence for the non-academic impacts of scholarly research.

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"Sharing Selves: Developing an Ethical Framework for Curating Social Media Data"

Sara Mannheimer and Elizabeth A. Hull have published "Sharing Selves: Developing an Ethical Framework for Curating Social Media Data" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Open sharing of social media data raises new ethical questions that researchers, repositories and data curators must confront, with little existing guidance available. In this paper, the authors draw upon their experiences in their multiple roles as data curators, academic librarians, and researchers to propose the STEP framework for curating and sharing social media data. The framework is intended to be used by data curators facilitating open publication of social media data. Two case studies from the Dryad Digital Repository serve to demonstrate implementation of the STEP framework. The STEP framework can serve as one important 'step' along the path to achieving safe, ethical, and reproducible social media research practice.

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Bots in the Twittersphere

The Pew Research Center has released Bots in the Twittersphere.

Here's an excerpt:

Among the key findings of this research:

  • Of all tweeted links2, 3 to popular websites, 66% are shared by accounts with characteristics common among automated "bots," rather than human users.
  • Among popular news and current event websites, 66% of tweeted links are made by suspected bots—identical to the overall average. The share of bot-created tweeted links is even higher among certain kinds of news sites. For example, an estimated 89% of tweeted links to popular aggregation sites that compile stories from around the web are posted by bots.

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"Accessible, Dynamic Web Content Using Instagram"

Jaci Wilkinson has published "Accessible, Dynamic Web Content Using Instagram" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

The Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at the University of Montana had a simple enough request. Their homepage had been static for years and it was not possible to add more content creation to anyone’s workload. However, they had a robust Instagram account with more than one thousand followers. Was there any way to synchronize workflows with an Instagram embed on the homepage? The solution was more complicated than we thought. We developed an Instagram embed, but in the process grappled with some fundamental questions of technology in the library. How do we streamline the creation and sharing of ephemeral, dynamic content? How do we reconcile web accessibility standards with the innovative new platforms we want to incorporate on our websites? . . . .

The ASC's embedded homepage Instagram feed fits their needs, is accessible, and builds community around their unique collections. By providing all the code created in this project in GitHub, including the CSS we used, our hope is that institutions interested in this Instagram feed model could replicate it for their own purposes without extensive technical support.

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"Why the World Reads Wikipedia: What We Learned about Reader Motivation from a Recent Research Study"

Florian Lemmerich et al. have published "Why the World Reads Wikipedia: What We Learned about Reader Motivation from a Recent Research Study."

Here's an excerpt:

Wikimedia's mission is to provide educational content and to effectively disseminate it. Doing so requires understanding the needs and motivations of the people who read Wikipedia. In this blog post, we discuss what we learned about Wikipedia reader motivations and needs across 14 languages from a recent research study.

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"A Longitudinal Assessment of the Persistence of Twitter Datasets"

Arkaitz Zubiaga has self-archived "A Longitudinal Assessment of the Persistence of Twitter Datasets."

Here's an excerpt:

With social media datasets being increasingly shared by researchers, it also presents the caveat that those datasets are not always completely replicable. Having to adhere to requirements of platforms like Twitter, researchers cannot release the raw data and instead have to release a list of unique identifiers, which others can then use to recollect the data from the platform themselves. This leads to the problem that subsets of the data may no longer be available, as content can be deleted or user accounts deactivated. To quantify the impact of content deletion in the replicability of datasets in a long term, we perform a longitudinal analysis of the persistence of 30 Twitter datasets, which include over 147 million tweets. . . . Even though the ratio of available tweets keeps decreasing as the dataset gets older, we find that the textual content of the recollected subset is still largely representative of the whole dataset that was originally collected. The representativity of the metadata, however, keeps decreasing over time, both because the dataset shrinks and because certain metadata, such as the users' number of followers, keeps changing.

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Social Media Use in 2018

The Pew Research Center has released Social Media Use in 2018.

Here's an excerpt:

Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.

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"Academic Journals with a Presence on Twitter Are More Widely Disseminated and Receive a Higher Number of Citations"

José Luis Ortega has published "Academic Journals with a Presence on Twitter Are More Widely Disseminated and Receive a Higher Number of Citations" in LSE Impact of Social Science.

Here's an excerpt:

In conclusion, these results make clear that the institutional presence of research journals on Twitter is fundamental for the dissemination and visibility of their outputs. Journals should consider Twitter as an important instrument for broadening audiences and tracking the social media impact of their publications. Furthermore, these findings suggest the best strategy to promote academic journals on Twitter is to have an individual account devoted exclusively to disseminating the journal’s content.

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"Scholarly Use of Social Media and Altmetrics: A Review of the Literature"

Cassidy R. Sugimoto et al. have self-archived "Scholarly Use of Social Media and Altmetrics: A Review of the Literature."

Here's an excerpt:

This review provides an extensive account of the state-of-the art in both scholarly use of social media and altmetrics. The review consists of two main parts: the first examines the use of social media in academia, examining the various functions these platforms have in the scholarly communication process and the factors that affect this use. The second part reviews empirical studies of altmetrics, discussing the various interpretations of altmetrics, data collection and methodological limitations, and differences according to platform. The review ends with a critical discussion of the implications of this transformation in the scholarly communication system.

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Preserving Social Media

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Preserving Social Media.

Here's an excerpt:

This report provides an overview of strategies for the archiving of social media for long-term access, for both policy and implementation. Specifically, it addresses social networking platforms and platforms with significant amounts of user-generated content, excluding blogs, trading, and marketing sites, which are covered in other Technology Watch Reports.

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"Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data"

Xianwen Wang, Shenmeng Xu, and Zhichao Fang have self-archived "Tracing Digital Footprints to Academic Articles: An Investigation of PeerJ Publication Referral Data."

Here's an excerpt:

In this study, we propose a novel way to explore the patterns of people's visits to academic articles. About 3.4 million links to referral source of visitors of 1432 papers published in the journal of PeerJ are collected and analyzed. We find that at least 57% visits are from external referral sources, among which General Search Engine, Social Network, and News & Blog are the top three categories of referrals. Academic Resource, including academic search engines and academic publishers' sites, is the fourth largest category of referral sources. In addition, our results show that Google contributes significantly the most in directing people to scholarly articles. . . . Correlation analysis and regression analysis indicates that papers with more mentions are expected to have more visitors, and Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are the most commonly used social networking tools that refer people to PeerJ.

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"Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads"

Christine Okret-Manville has published "Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

For some years, researchers have been using new ways to communicate and share their work by using academic social networks. In an attempt to foster the development of Open Access in France, the French consortium COUPERIN (Unified Consortium of Higher Education and Research Organizations for Access to Numerical Publications) proposed that academic social networks could be used to convince researchers of becoming more involved in Open Access. To test this hypothesis, a nationwide survey was launched in 2014 to explore whether and how these academic social networks are used to share content, but also how they compare to other Open Access classic tools. Within a month (20 May to 20 June), 1,898 researchers answered this 28-question survey. It was fully completed by 1,698 of them.

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Social Media Usage: 2005-2015

The Pew Research Center has released Social Media Usage: 2005-2015.

Here's an excerpt:

Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites, up from 7% when Pew Research Center began systematically tracking social media usage in 2005. Pew Research reports have documented in great detail how the rise of social media has affected such things as work, politics and political deliberation, communications patterns around the globe, as well as the way people get and share information about health, civic life, news consumption, communities, teenage life, parenting, dating and even people's level of stress.

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"A Library in the Palm of Your Hand: Mobile Services in Top 100 University Libraries"

Yan Quan Liu and Sarah Briggs have published "A Library in the Palm of Your Hand: Mobile Services in Top 100 University Libraries" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

What is the current state of mobile services among academic libraries of the country's top 100 universities, and what are the best practices for librarians implementing mobile services at the university level? Through in-depth website visits and survey questionnaires, the authors studied each of the top 100 universities' libraries' experiences with mobile services. Results showed that all of these libraries offered at least one mobile service, and the majority offered multiple services. The most common mobile services offered were mobile sites, text messaging services, e-books, and mobile access to databases and the catalog. In addition, chat/IM services, social media accounts and apps were very popular. Survey responses also indicated a trend towards responsive design for websites so that patrons can access the library's full site on any mobile device. Respondents recommend that libraries considering offering mobile services begin as soon as possible as patron demand for these services is expected to increase.

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"Scholarly Social Media Profiles and Libraries: A Review"

Judit Ward et al. have published "Scholarly Social Media Profiles and Libraries: A Review" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This article aims to point out emerging roles and responsibilities for academic librarians with the potential of better integrating the library in the research process. In order to find out how to enhance the online reputation and discoverability of individual faculty members as well as their affiliated institutions, the authors worked side-by-side with researchers in the United States and Europe to explore, create, revise, and disambiguate scholarly profiles in various software applications. In an attempt to understand and organize scholarly social media, including new, alternative metrics, the authors reviewed and classified the major academic profile platforms, highlighting the overlapping elements, benefits, and drawbacks inherent in each. The consensus is that it would be time-consuming to keep one's profile current and accurate on all of these platforms, given the plethora of underlying problems, also discussed in detail in the article. However, it came as a startling discovery that reluctance to engage with scholarly social media may cause a misrepresentation of a researcher's academic achievements and may come with unforeseen consequences. The authors claim that current skills and competencies can secure an essential role for academic librarians in the research workflow by means of monitoring and navigating researcher profiles in scholarly social media in order to best represent the scholarship of their host institutions.

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"Fast and Made to Last: Academic Blogs Look to Ensure Long-Term Accessibility and Stability of Content"

Christof Schöch has published "Fast and Made to Last: Academic Blogs Look to Ensure Long-Term Accessibility and Stability of Content" in Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

The advantage of blogs compared with such talks is that here, discussions can happen across geographical and temporal borders, and that they stay visible online in comments or companion posts. But aren't blog posts, ultimately, almost as fleeting as a talk at a workshop? Who makes sure the content stays online not just today and tomorrow, but in the long term? Who guarantees that the link to the post remains the same? Who ensures that the text will not be modified later on? These are issues that need to be resolved if blogs are to be reliable, trusted, citeable resources and receive academic recognition even in the absence of traditional pre-publication peer-review. . . . The research blogging platform hypotheses.org has understood this early on. This fact is undoubtedly a factor in the success of the platform, which is run by the French initiative OpenEdition and currently hosts 1006 (and counting) research blogs in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and English coming from the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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"Tweets as Impact Indicators: Examining the Implications of Automated Bot Accounts on Twitter"

Stefanie Haustein et al. have self-archived "Tweets as Impact Indicators: Examining the Implications of Automated Bot Accounts on Twitter."

Here's an excerpt:

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics (altmetrics), where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. We present preliminary findings that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific papers and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose differentiating between different levels of engagement from tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a paper.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Terms of Service on Social Media Sites"

Corinne Hui Yun Tan has self-archived "Terms of Service on Social Media Sites".

Here's an excerpt:

This article considers the provisions within the terms of service ('TOS') of the social media behemoths of today—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the Wikimedia Foundation. In particular, it examines the main provisions that purport to regulate, from a copyright perspective, generative activities on social media sites. This empirical work is undertaken so that the article can shed light on the relationship between the contractual and copyright regimes. To do so, the article identifies the instances where the contractual regime is to some extent aligned with the copyright regime, and further, where there are potential incompatibilities between the two regimes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Online Collaboration: Scientists and the Social Network"

Richard Van Noorde has published "Online Collaboration: Scientists and the Social Network" in Nature.

Here's an excerpt:

More than 4.5 million researchers have signed up for ResearchGate, and another 10,000 arrive every day, says Madisch. That is a pittance compared with Facebook's 1.3 billion active users, but astonishing for a network that only researchers can join.

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PressFoward Plugin for WordPress Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has released the PressFoward plugin for WordPress.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A tool for aggregating, curating and publishing content from the web, PressForward will change the way that websites find and publish the news and stories they share. PressForward enables individuals and communities to develop their own aggregated publications and will change the way that journalists, bloggers, and institutions find audiences for their work.

Available for download from the WordPress.org Directory or from the Administrative Dashboard within a WordPress website, PressForward allows users to collect content published elsewhere on the web, discuss it with potential collaborators, and format and publish that content without ever leaving their website dashboard. For those who want to roam the web looking for news or articles to share, PressForward also provides a bookmarklet that makes it possible to capture content for your website with a simple click on your toolbar.

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