FLICKR, ANDREAS ELDHSocial media and Web 2.0 technologies are narrowing the communication divide between experts, journalists, and lay audiences. Not only can scientists communicate to lay audiences directly, they can interact with them. Given the rate at which modern technologies leave the lab and hit the marketplace, media outlets are extremely important for building public awareness around new breakthroughs in science and technology. Nanotechnology, for example, first caught the public’s collective eye through popular accounts in comic books, movies, and television series like Star Trek.
Despite the common assumption by scientists that public communication is rarely beneficial and may be detrimental—for example, by being too time consuming—there has been no empirical investigation into whether scientists’ efforts to communicate with wider audiences through social media are impactful for their careers.
In order to investigate this issue, we surveyed leading scientists involved in nanotechnology research at universities across the United States to ask them about their behaviors regarding lay communication, then tracked their academic impact using the h-index (PNAS, 102:16569-72, 2005), a measure that includes the number of peer-reviewed articles published and the number of citations accrued. Using survey data and data on scientists’ online activity that we collected in 2011 and 2012, we examined differences in h-indices among scientists who participated ...
