FEATURE
Research Assessment
The problem with measuring Twitter
With social media fi nding its way into every aspect of our lives, it is becoming increasingly interesting to fi nd what it says about the value of research. It’s not a simple process, however, as David Stuart reveals
W
eb 2.0 sites and technologies are increasingly recognised as important tools for the research community. They offer both new networking opportunities and the
ability to share a wide variety of content easily, much of which wouldn’t have been captured in traditional publication processes. What is also increasingly recognised, albeit currently to a far lesser extent, is the need for new metrics to measure the use and impact of these tools. This is to encourage wider adoption of the technologies, to enable researchers to benchmark their activities, and so that researchers that successfully make use of these new technologies can be recognised for their efforts.
However, while the web provides the opportunity for the collection of a wide variety
18 Research Information OCT/NOV 2011
of metrics, it is important that we don’t confuse what is available with what is meaningful. Even for a service such as Twitter that is relatively uncomplicated, open, and well established, the creation of useful metrics is by no means simple. At its core, Twitter allows users to publish
short posts of up to 140 characters in answer to a simple question. Originally this question
‘Metrics are not simple, or obvious, and can only be established through discussion in the open rather than behind closed doors’
was the personal ‘What are you doing?’ but it was changed in November 2009 to the broader ‘What’s happening?’; a change that refl ects the way Twitter has evolved away from the personal status updates for which it was originally intended, to being used by a whole host of individuals and organisations for an ever increasing number of purposes. As well as using Twitter to post short updates
about their work activities, a researcher may also use Twitter to share links to more detailed work elsewhere, to comment on other people’s work, participate in conference discussions, have conversations with colleagues, or even to automatically share data from an experiment. Twitter not only eases certain processes that may otherwise have been more diffi cult, but importantly it offers the potential to measure such activities. However, while the expanding number of uses to which Twitter is being put is a sign of its usefulness as a tool, it inevitably creates diffi culties when trying to gain real insight from that use. Understanding the impact of any particular research output, whether it is a journal article or an update on Twitter, requires comparison with other similar outputs. We can no more draw a conclusion about the value of a researcher’s
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