This report has been commissioned by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to analyze
the role that social media currently plays in scholarly communication as well as to what extent metrics derived
from social media activity related to scholarly content can be applied in an evaluation context.
Scholarly communication has become more diverse and open with research being discussed, shared and
evaluated online. Social media tools are increasingly being used in the research and scholarly communication
context, as scholars connect on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter or specialized platforms such as ResearchGate,
Academia.edu or Mendeley. Research is discussed on blogs or Twitter, while datasets, software code and
presentations are shared on Dryad, Github, FigShare and similar websites for reproducibility and reuse. Literature
is managed, annotated and shared with online tools such as Mendeley and Zotero, and peer review is starting to
be more open and transparent. The changing landscape of scholarly communication has also brought about new
possibilities regarding its evaluation. So-called altmetrics are based on scholarly social media activity and have
been introduced to reflect scholarly output and impact beyond considering only peer-reviewed journal articles
and citations within them to measure scientific success. This includes the measurement of more diverse types of
scholarly work and various forms of impact including that on society.
This report provides an overview of how various social media tools are used in the research context based on
1) an extensive review of the current literature as well as 2) an empirical analysis of the use of Twitter by the 2010
cohort of SSHRC Doctoral Award recipients was analyzed in depth. Twitter has been chosen as one of the most
promising tools regarding interaction with the general public and scholarly communication beyond the scientific
community. The report focuses on the opportunities and challenges of social media and derived metrics and
attempts to provide SSHRC with information to develop guidelines regarding the use of social media by funded
researchers as well support the informed used of social media metrics
