Mar 2015
In recent years, the use of social networks in science communication has been increasing on a large scale, and specific platforms have been created for interaction and information sharing among researchers. Despite the increasing interest of the academic community on social networks as a tool for scientific communication, little is known about the usage profile of these tools, and how traditional measures of scientific impact based on citations (offline indexes, impact off-line) correlate with the new impact measure (online index, impact online).
A paper presented at the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in 20141by researchers from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland examined whether and how scientific impact can be measured through social media data analysis, and how this approach is related to the traditional metrics. According to the authors, network centrality measures2 based on analysis of social media had not been considered in the context of the impact assessment. The results of the exploratory work, performed at a single institution with a small number of researchers, indicate that these measures correlate with traditional impact metrics and can be used to complement them.
Read full story in the website of Scielo in Perspective.
