Science, Twitter-Reviewed

140 characters – that’s the self-imposed restriction on the length of text messages processed by the micro-blogging service twitter. Seemingly, brevity is the soul of wit, since twitter is getting more and more popular. This raises the often discussed question, what twitter is actually good for.

Between all the pros and cons one finds that it is a great way to share small pieces of information, fragments of ideas, snippets of thought, mini-discussions – and in fact, this can be quite efficient! Twitter builds networks of information streams by allowing you to follow people, whose tweets are then displayed directly to you. This being the primary way of communication management, some secondary tools have emerged like hashtagging, twitter groups and the habit of re-tweeting. A very immediate consequence of this is that interesting information can spread quite rapidly – and indeed, I often receive very interesting links to news, articles or blogs via twitter which I might have missed otherwise. What’s interesting though is defined by the twitter community, the mass of minds behind the millions of tweets.

Naturally, also science is entering the stream, which is definitively a good thing. Sharing ideas, discussing and delivering research results to the public are certainly part of the scientific responsibility. Some of the hashtags used by scientwists are e.g. #science (of course), #PRLit (for peer-reviewed literature) and #arxiv (for pre-prints).

Recently, people have become keen about the idea of using twitter for ranking information on the internet. Of course, interesting articles will be shared by tweeting their links. The more people regard some tweet as interesting, the more often it will be re-tweeted. Considering that usually only trustful sources are re-tweeted (let’s say so, at least), this gives a nice way of measuring the impact of some weblink (strictly speaking, since the link itself is the only information shared).

Not surprisingly also scientific articles have now been submitted to such a kind of ranking. On a daily basis the twitter stream is searched for arXiv-links, which provides the basis for a list of the week’s most popular pre-prints. While it is interesting to watch the (still enormously noisy) statistics – thanks, Robert, for creating the site! – rankings like this should also cause some uneasiness.

Science is subject to trends. Probably on a long term scale this is not a problem at all. Still, the mere existence of a mainstream can make it difficult for individuals to conduct their research outside that stream. Mainstream means popularity, popularity means high ranking, high ranking creates more popularity.

While this is a generic problem, a twitter-based ranking comes with even more, practical, problems: for example, a person with 20000 followers promoting a link will probably create a much larger number of re-tweets than a person with only few followers. Thus the ranking of a link will be correlated with the popularity of the tweeter – and it is quite obvious that there are ways to ‘optimize‘ your popularity. This means that papers and ideas can easily be actively promoted by individuals generating a distorted image of some research fields in the public. In addition possibly lower quality may be rewarded, since papers dealing with topics which are easily accessible to the public will gain higher impact than abstract technical papers with lots of formulas.

Still, I do not think that twitter should not be used in relation to science. Rather, we must become aware of the nature of twitter’s information stream and utilize it correctly. This way of information propagation is new, fast and developing quickly while providing many new possibilities. We must understand what a twitter based ranking measures, if anything. In the end, twitter is certainly not a filter which separates important from unimportant ideas. But it is a great way to link up, answer questions, engage in discussions and share ideas – if you want, follow my tweets.

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