To what extent do scientists use social software?
(first - apology for being so quiet on here - I'm ok, but have sort of a writers' block for the 2 presentations I have to do in the next couple of weeks, the paper that I'm trying to get journal-ready, the two literature reviews for quantitative projects, and the conference paper that's due on the 15th... well and the standard homework and teaching myself R)
( let's actually talk about
STEM, but not really clinical medicine, well, unless you want to)
The point of this post is to say what I know about the title, and to ask for pointers for additional information. Ideally, I'd like percentages or some such for various flavors of STEM researchers using each type of social software.
Here's what I have.
From:
Mark Ware Consulting. (2008). Peer review in scholarly journals: Perspective of the scholarly community – an international study. Bristol, UK: Author. Retrieved January 28, 2008 from http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PeerReviewFullPRCReport-final.pdf
| Clinical Medicine | Life Sciences | Physical Sciences and Engineering |
RSS News Readers | 20 | 21 | 27 |
Read blogs regularly | 11 | 11 | 16 |
Have own blog or actively comment on others’ blogs | 2 | 2 | 4 |
Contribute to work-related wiki | 8 | 9 | 15 |
Social bookmarking | 7 | 5 | 9 |
From 2006 APS Industrial Membership Survey Final Report September 12, 2006. http://www.aps.org/about/governance/committees/commemb/upload/2006_Industrial_Member_Survey.pdf
5% of Industrial Physicists surveyed read or maintain blogs for social networking
From both
Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell, 129(3), 443-445. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032 and Hannay, T. (2007). Web 2.0 in science. CTWatch Quarterly, 3(3) . Retrieved March 8,2008 from http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/web-20-in-science/
Estimates that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 science blogs
Otherwise just sort of case studies of individual physicists, biologists, chemists developing and using wiki software (or even in some cases semantic wiki software). (Into this category go Distler, Bradley, Murray-Rust, etc.)
Personally, I think the APS number is pretty encouraging because I would think industrial physicists would be much less likely to adopt these things than academics and also because they might read blogs and not know they're reading a blog.
Help? Any other stats?
Any better numbers on scientists contributing to or maintaining wikis? Using social bookmarking? Blogs come and go, any idea whether there's a net plus for science?
Thanks in advance for any help!