Getting started on Twitter as a scientist
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
In my experience that’s about 90% true, but there’s a small minority of people who remain thoughtful and insightful even in 280 characters. If you can find them and mutually follow each other, and then mute or block all the blowhards, tryhards and self-promoters, you’ll have cultivated a useful network of colleagues beyond what you might otherwise have via work and conferences.
And if multi-disciplinary perspectives are valuable to your own research, then that Twitter network is especially valuable in that regard, as it’s likely to be at least as multidisplinary as your day-to-day work environment and more-so than your usual conference circuit.
That said, it does take some work to cultivate that graph. May or may not be worth the time and opportunity cost.
Do you have any people you'd like to call out to follow? I'm curious about good environmental data and how we can better model our investment in our natural resources.
Using the Twitter website is still madness, though. The only way I can survive Twitter is with an app like Tweetbot or Fenix, that doesn't show what other users Like & keeps everything chronological. They're still around from the days when Twitter was designed to be used by third-party client apps, ala IRC.
Second this, absolutely necessary. You don't need many connections to make it worthwhile, just ones you wouldn't otherwise connect with in some other way besides Twitter.
It's helped my career. It's let me connect with senior colleagues who aren't at my institution, introduced me to several people I've invited as speakers, and I've written two papers with people I met over Twitter and who I've never met in real life.
The key is curation.
Yes there are hot (wrong) takes, snark, etc., but most of it is just plain old paper / blog post announcements with some helpful summaries in a thread (eg https://twitter.com/kelvin_guu/status/1227378652318330885 , https://twitter.com/lmthang/status/1222234237262159872).
It has definitely allowed me to come across papers and researchers I would not have seen otherwise, and this is it's main utility (aside from just being a great way to keep up with new stuff).
But there's been one really nice, overriding factor for me: Twitter pals.
I feel like I've gained a few internet ride-or-dies, even if it's mostly us liking / commenting on each other's stuff.
Equally, if you draw attention to someone, even if you aren't disagreeing with them, you have to be aware that you're likely subjecting them to a level of unwanted attention from your audience.
> It is perfectly okay to not look at Twitter for hours or even days.
> Do not worry that this might be confusing: Twitter users can easily skip over tweets in languages they are not proficient in...
Who is the target audience of a text like this? Do people feel they need someone's permission to block someone, or to skip Twitter for a while, or to write in whichever language they please? Honestly!
Protecting the brand (yourself) is important.
To distinguish the brand (yourself) from others, the brand (you) has to set something people can look up to as a way to differentiate their experience with them (you).
What the brand (you) likes, follows, engages with etc defines the image of them (you) and the right market fit (their feed).
Accessibility is a huge factor for a commodity (sellable parts of you as a whole) whilst some blocking may be necessary for setting the cultural expectations for the brand (you).
If the brand (you) block people from certain group and it is public, that might work as a signal for what the brand (you) stands for.
Let's suppose the brand (I) blocks a mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, then that works as a signal for that the brand (I) cares about privacy and against people who exploit that.
If the brand (I) only uses English to tweet, then that might be a signal for which audience product (I) is made for.
If the brands (yours) block list isn't diverse, it might signal as a racial/ethnic/gender/sex bias.
As a newcomer you don't know how important it is to take this into account.
In the thousands of hours that users sink into social media in a year one could instead read, learn to code, learn an instrument or learn anything at all. Who is more interesting, a biologist who plays the mandolin and is semi-fluent in a second language or a biologist with lots of Twitter followers?
A second use is a signalling factor that you are active in the field - really an exercise in building brand.
Finally, there are probably two people who actively engage in discussion on Twitter (from my field). This doesn't happen more often because scientific review is a subtle beast, and doing it in the open with 280 chars, as quickly as possible on a phone isn't conducive to constructive feedback. In fact, I've got a number of draft tweets initiating discussions that I didn't end up sending because it just felt plain rude to review in that manner!
"Neat discussion of benefits of this here platform for scientists / researchers. Personally I was pretty mystified with its popularity til trying it and finding it useful, so this might be helpful for like-minded ppl. But, imo it's really mostly a great way to keep up w news. https://t.co/J3aLAh56W3"
Really, don't knock it til you try it. As I said in a reply on here, the biggest benefit is being able to keep up with neat new papers from researchers you think do cool work. Just after that first tweet I just happened to see this from a researcher at Google:
"New from Google Research! REALM: https://t.co/kS2oTyxAAj We pretrain an LM that sparsely attends over all of Wikipedia as extra context. We backprop through a latent retrieval step on 13M docs. Yields new SOTA results for open domain QA, breaking 40 on NaturalQuestions-Open! https://t.co/DYDFX69Td8"
And I retweeted it with a comment that it's cool (and read the paper to understand a bit more) and now follow that researcher.
Like any big platform, Twitter can be used in bad ways (engaging in drama, constantly looking at it instead of working coughmuch like HNcough, etc.), and it can be used in many good ways. I was pleasantly surprised with how useful it actually is, personally.
That being said... much of the content of this article is kinda weird, it's not like this is that complicated... I guess the intent is to speak to more senior researchers, but it does come off weird.
Receiving information is not the same as being informed. The head of Facebook’s news authority is the owner of a far-right news site. A famous 2012 study[1] found that Fox News viewers were the least informed on facts covered by the news while NPR listeners were the most informed. Fox viewers were even less informed than those who consumed no news media at all. All news is not created equal and you are what you read. Curation is important and an organization with a fact-oriented status quo is a superior source.
1. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/survey-nprs-l...
But like any war zone if you're tough and willing to take a risk there's money to be made.
But if you cry over getting rape and death threats or don't like people who make them, then just don't go there. That is part of Twitter, it's in it's fundamental design, you enter 7 billions peoples homes and ask what they think of your opinion. It's not for the normal scientist, they can do great things outside of Twitter.
To your point, yes the character limit seems likely it is a factor of why it's so bad. But lot's more people than J. Peterson think that.
But he perhaps was one of the first to think fundamentally at a low physiological level what was happening.
I hate how much time academic institutions and PIs are investing in social media, curating facebook pages, twitter pages, a linked pages yadda yadda. It's mostly scientists chasing publicity so they can add another blog/newspaper article bullet to their CV so they can get more funding. I sincerely hope funding bodies start banning those publicity bullet points from CVs during evaluations.
Also, most major funding bodies (NSF, NIH, etc.) use standard "biosketch" templates that are separate from CVs already and don't use that category.