Scientific birds of a feather flock together: science communication on social media rarely happens across or beyond disciplinary boundaries

The success of academic research in reaching out beyond its own scientific community is a perennial concern, even more so following the rapid adoption of social media and the ability to easily transmit information to potentially millions of people. Consequently, many attempts have been made to capture the broad scientific impact beyond academia using social media data. But is increased social media attention really indicative of “broader impact”? Qing Ke, Yong-Yeol Ahn and Cassidy R. Sugimoto have studied how much scientific discourse is happening across and beyond scientific communities on Twitter and found that social media does not broaden scientific communication, but rather replicates and perpetuates pre-established disciplinary boundaries. “Alt” metrics may not be so alternative after all

AAPOR Report on Big Data

In recent years we have seen an increase in the amount of statistics in society describing different phenomena based on so called Big Data. The term Big Data is used for a variety of data as explained in the report, many of them characterized not just by their large volume, but also by their variety and velocity, the organic way in which they are created, and the new types of processes needed to analyze them and make inference from them. The change in the nature of the new types of data, their availability, the way in which they are collected, and disseminated are fundamental. The change constitutes a paradigm shift for survey research.There is a great potential in Big Data but there are some fundamental challenges that have to be resolved before its full potential can be realized. In this report we give examples of different types of Big Data and their potential for survey research. We also describe the Big Data process and discuss its main challenges