Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. These, and similar smaller options, have become endemic, ubiquitous and pervasive.
But, what is their relevance to science and to professional development? It's a lot more than you might imagine. The obvious connection (pun intended) is the connectedness. Through these social media we can connect with students, alumni, colleagues and track our competitors.
The obvious implications of social media for science relate to their role in dissemination of information. Through social media, we can spread the virtual word. In science, this tends to be viewed as a good thing. Letting others know of our achievements and discoveries (loosely defined) ought to make the advancement of science even faster. We do science for the purpose of creating knowledge and are paid to do so.
The less obvious implications of the full range of social media and message exchange platforms relate to assessing the impact of that achievement or discovery. The use of bibliometrics, mostly through the use of journal impact factors (JIF), has become a standard for assessing whether a faculty member deserves promotion. But, the evolution and development of measuring impact has continued. We now must contend with a future possibility of being evaluated based on the altmetrics of our work. Altmetrics takes into account not just citations, as is done for the JIF, but also the extent to which the article generates conversation and interest, and thus merges the social media with the bibliometrics. Consider that impact might include the number of tweets and re-tweets, as well as the number of Facebook likes and comments and number of times the article is downloaded or bookmarked.
Big Brother, hopefully the good and just one rather than the mean, bullying one, has arrived. As scholars, we need to take as a given that someone will be tracking not only our pebble of knowledge being dropped into the pond of knowledge, but will also be tracking the size, number and duration of the ripples from that pebble.
