Sylvester is continuously ogling new readers for his scientific communications. Pawing at several social media, he purrs:
Do you need Twitter to spread your science?
Dear Sylvester,
Yes. Next question, please.
I mean, it’s quite popular. Isn’t it? If you throw in a couple of tags to institutions, active members of the scientific social media community or even just some journals there’s a good chance you will get picked up sooner or later in a retweet or whatnot. Quite a good chance. Sure, there’s a myriad of options floating around the ol’ world wide web, yet this seems to be the one true calling for avid scientist. Why I would say that? It’s the ultimate writing training; you go ahead and cram you whole paper into a 280 character-limited piece of text. A piece of text which 1) is appealing, 2) makes sense, 3) gives ALL relevant information, and 4) will result in people picking it up. It’s abstract construction for pros whilst trivializing journal abstract limits. In my humble opinion.
Knowing that this very post is issued on another (reservedly successful) medium, it cannot be compared to the overwhelming distribution and impact of tweets. They truly are the siren song of the counterculture that is the scientific community. We all know the effect of siren songs; luring in some interested party. It’s therefore not that large a surprise to learn that this very blog cannot stand on its own and requires the might of the tweet to gain and sustain traffic. Traffic which would otherwise be constrained to other institutions. And what horror it would be to be constrained like that. It’s as if you would be put in a gilded cage, and you would miss out on all of the nuggets we throw around on the GD blog. Who here doesn’t have their message bell function on their phone set at max volume not to miss out on the latest news? It’s ever so efficient to mix it up with your own science. I consider it to be snub-adjacent in case you feel you’re too good for Twitter. Sakes.
Yours truly,
The Sassy Scientist
PS: This post was written from inside my own gilded cage.
