Post2: Twitter, meet Science: The World of Scientwists

“532 Scientific Twitter Friends” is a July 9, 2009 article that appeared on Sciencebase, an online magazine written by David Bradley, who describes it as the “place to be for reactive science communication on the web, covering all areas of scientific, technical, engineering, and medical topics in a timely and informative manner” (faq). This article marks the passage of the 500 marks for Bradley’s science related friends ("friends," in this case, seems to mean that there is a reciprocal relationship of "following") on Twitter. At the beginning of 2009 Bradley assessed his Twitter friends (through a process of downloading his friends list, saving the CSV files and opening a spreadsheet in order to sort), and discovered that 100 of his current contacts were members of the scientific community, he listed these “Scientwists” on his blog and so began a list outside of Twitter of Twitter science tweeters. Similar to our discussion of Twitter as a means of gaining tenure, he states that list “formed the basis of a nice trade – you retweet or comment on the list and I’ll add you if you’re aren’t already on it and if you are I’d activate your twitter name and so it grows.” This has proved true for his own Twitter account, as well as others – some tweeters listed on Bradley’s list gained hundreds of new followers.
As evidence for Bradley’s argument the graph illustrates how over the course of a few months his followers grew by hundreds due to retweets and articles related to twitter and science writers.

To date, he is up to 5,220 followers and follows 1,856 tweeters.


Inspired by Bradley’s use of Twitter in the scientific community’s communication, Andrew Maynard of the blog 2020 Science wanted to “get a feel for how science information is beginning to flow between different communities and users on the web” in his article "As Twitter users skyrocket, how are the science tweeps doing?" Thus he created a bubble chart representing science tweeters and their number of followers, including some tweeters followers in the tens of thousands.


Though he recognizes that his measures are crude and the study incomplete he believes that it “at least suggest that scientists and science writers are beginning to embrace new social media.”