Social impact in social media : A new method to evaluate the social impact of research
Pulido, Cristina (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Redondo-Sama, Gisela (Universidad de Zaragoza)
Sordè i Martí, Teresa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Flecha, Ramón (Universitat de Barcelona)

Data:	2018
Resum:	The social impact of research has usually been analysed through the scientific outcomes produced under the auspices of the research. The growth of scholarly content in social media and the use of altmetrics by researchers to track their work facilitate the advancement in evaluating the impact of research. However, there is a gap in the identification of evidence of the social impact in terms of what citizens are sharing on their social media platforms. This article applies a social impact in social media methodology (SISM) to identify quantitative and qualitative evidence of the potential or real social impact of research shared on social media, specifically on Twitter and Facebook. We define the social impact coverage ratio (SICOR) to identify the percentage of tweets and Facebook posts providing information about potential or actual social impact in relation to the total amount of social media data found related to specific research projects. We selected 10 projects in different fields of knowledge to calculate the SICOR, and the results indicate that 0. 43% of the tweets and Facebook posts collected provide linkages with information about social impact. However, our analysis indicates that some projects have a high percentage (4. 98%) and others have no evidence of social impact shared in social media. Examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact are provided to illustrate these results. A general finding is that novel evidences of social impact of research can be found in social media, becoming relevant platforms for scientists to spread quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact in social media to capture the interest of citizens. Thus, social media users are showed to be intermediaries making visible and assessing evidence of social impact.
Ajuts:	European Commission 613202
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Publicat a:	PloS one, Vol. 13 (august 2018) , ISSN 1932-6203

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203117
PMID: 30157262

20 p, 1.1 MB

El registre apareix a les col·leccions:
Documents de recerca > Documents dels grups de recerca de la UAB > Centres i grups de recerca (producció científica) > Ciències socials i jurídiques > Gabinet de Comunicació i Educació
Articles > Articles de recerca
Articles > Articles publicats