I agree completely. Nature is not the only journal that is exploring
alternative methods to increase exposure through tweets, fb, etc. The
more exposure the better, and all the journals are competing for
attention. The bigger problem with flash-science journals like Nature
and Science is that researchers excited about new results do not always
carefully consider their manuscripts before submitting. Consequently,
these two journals have the highest retraction rates of any in the
non-medical fields of biology. While they do have high "impact factors"
I would argue that these short treatments of results are not as
influential as papers that are more thorough and thoughtful.
Mitch Cruzan
On 4/15/2015 4:28 PM, Caitlin Littlefield wrote:
As a millennial ecologist(-in-training), I regularly skim through the TOCs
of most ecological journals, and I certainly see many articles circulated
through email. But a non-trivial amount of my exposure to new science is
through the Twitter feeds of the journals themselves, scientific
organizations, and ecologists I respect. So I'll respectfully disagree
with your implied conclusion that for science to be "taken seriously", we
must remain aloof of social media. Furthermore, if social media is an
avenue for the general public to read about/engage in/comment on science,
then I do indeed think Tweet-ability can be one metric by which articles
are assessed. And perhaps it ought to be, if it encourages researchers to
communicate their science in a way that's accessible to others outside of
their disciplines, to the general public, and even to the Kardashians.
--
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Mitch Cruzan
Professor of Biology
Portland State University
Department of Biology, SRTC rm 246, PO Box 751
Portland, OR 97207 USA
http://web.pdx.edu/~cruzan/
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