Comments on: Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking

By: A digital pioneer in the scientific tradition: Rock on, Rachel. « Backseat Broadband

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:59:16 +0000

[...] the Web a little and discovered that Ms. Pittman isn’t alone in feeling like a lone voice. David Bradley of Science Base recently wrote that about one in 7 scientists actively use social media, compared to roughly 9 out of 10 for the rest [...]

By: The Fear and Exhilaration of Breaking New Ground « Social Works

The Fear and Exhilaration of Breaking New Ground « Social Works — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:32:27 +0000

[...] As it turns out, that initial intuition was well founded. I’ve found numerous articles and blog posts proclaiming the lack of enthusiasm among scientists and researchers for social networking. This is an odd finding, according to Richard Lackes of the Department of Business Information Management at Technische Universitaet Dortmund, Germany. He points out that scientific research is essentially a communication-driven process and that most of its participants are young and part of what we might refer to as the Facebook generation (Gen-F, you might say). Members of the business world have a much more even spread of ages and differences in internet acceptance, and yet, it is business users who are much more committed to online social networking. via Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking [...]

By: Scientists Are Using Social Media Tools (and May Be Using Social Networks, Too) « The Scholarly Kitchen

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:11:41 +0000

[...] David’s assertion that scientists aren’t joining social networks. Clicking through to his primary source, I found the curious opening sentence: A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn [...]

By: marina gorbis

marina gorbis — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:50:45 +0000

RT @sciencebase Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking — Sciencebase Science Blog http://bit.ly/2VmMNc

By: Scientists Still Not Joining Social Networks « The Scholarly Kitchen

Scientists Still Not Joining Social Networks « The Scholarly Kitchen — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:57:48 +0000

[...] offered, and participation still seems to be lagging. David Bradley at the Sciencebase blog has done an excellent recent review and it appears that things haven’t changed very much: “The point of all these various [...]

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:45:53 +0000

@David That could apply to all fields though not just scientific research. Maybe when we get web 3.0 we’ll all stop tweeting and poking…

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:59:25 +0000

That’s the thing though–there’s a big difference to doing a poster once, or a talk here and there, or taking a course, and spending time every day or every week “communicating” one’s research in a social network. That’s time that could be spent more productively doing research.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:47:18 +0000

@David Yeah, point taken re early career. But, more and more these days there are modules in science courses about communication and I don’t know a PhD who didn’t have to do a poster session or a presentation at least once! As to the career credit aspect. That’s a very important point. You cannot cite retweets in your thesis, after all…

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:26:08 +0000

1997? Well, you’ve got me beat there, I’ll have to concede. I do agree that communication is a vital part of being a scientist. But again, if we’re talking about young scientists, how many times does an early graduate student give a talk at a meeting to describe their work? How often do they give a departmental seminar, a lab meeting or write a paper? Not all that often, at least early in one’s career. You just don’t have a whole lot that needs to be communicated until you’ve done the actual research. And as noted before, the further along you get in your career, the less likely you are to spend time in social networks, when that time could be spent communicating in ways that give career credit and advance one in a more formal manner.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:34:08 +0000

@David LOL February 2008 you say…well….in my previous incarnation as Catalyst columnist on the original ChemWeb.com…which was back in ’97 (1997, not 1897, admittedly) I wrote about the burgeoning world of online networks and the web (1.0) and how it could benefit scientists…it’s more than a decade for things to mature to the point we’re at now at with 1 in 7 researchers using social networking.

Seriously though, finding collaborators may not be a time intensive task for scientists, but surely for the majority communicating results, either to other members of the team or the wider community is one of the most. What is a scientific result if it is not communicated. Ask Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine Lavoisier to compare notes about their work. There would never have been the oxygenated controversy if Scheele had been doing Open Notebook science. But, I do agree Krueger does hit the nail on the head.