Signed up for one of the science Mastodon fiefdoms and there is nothing in the world you could pay me that would convince me to hitch my wagon to this freak train
Gonna send them Isadore Nabi's Google scholar page and see what happens 🤞
A mass exodus of scientists from Twitter to Mastodon would basically amount to the community giving up on social media as a vehicle for combating mis/disinformation and weaponized science
This plot from my 2020 @PLOSBiology paper showing how extremists can dominate online discussions about research papers? Only gonna get worse if we decide Mastodon is the promised land of self-segregated digital academia
Building a following on science Twitter takes years, and that's within an ecosystem that already had hundreds of millions of users when most of us joined. Mastodon has a tiny fraction of that, and its discovery features are hyperfocused on the server hosting your account
Six years ago, I began investigating how genetics research gets appropriated and integrated into white supremacist ideologies. (1/n)
As many of you know, the Buffalo shooter’s screed explicitly invoked genetics research papers, and the scientific community has loudly been grappling with the implications…What do we do about it? Who's to blame? What qualifies as “censorship?”
In light of these conversations, it’s clear to me that many scientists are completely oblivious to the ecosystem that fostered the shooter’s embrace of these research papers, so I hope to provide some foundational information to guide ongoing discussions.
Excited to share my latest preprint with @Kelley__Harris, where we take a deep dive into the bibliometrics and altmetrics of Richard Lewontin's "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
We aim to tell the story of how, why, and when TAoHD became iconic, and discuss the implications for how human population genetics research is carried out and communicated in the current scientific and sociocultural ecosystem.
The citation trajectory of the paper looks....weird. It's roughly bimodal, with a weak pulse in the 70s-80s, followed by a 2nd surge starting in the early 90s and peaking in the mid-2010s. Only 15% of citations occurred in the first 30 years, and 85% in just the last 20.
Out now in @PLOSBiology, @Kelley__Harris and I try to unravel what altmetrics and the fire hose of social media data really tell us about the potential impacts of research papers. 1/n
First, some background. Academics are *obsessed* with impact. Our entire ecosystem—grants, tenure, publications, etc.—is built around generating new & striking knowledge, with an implicit goal of producing immediate economic, environmental, or cultural impacts. 2/n
Impact is remarkably difficult to measure, and even harder to predict. Remember 2017 Nobel winner Jeffrey Hall? He left academia a decade prior, in part because the impact of his work was not immediately appreciated by funders and publishers. 3/n