I ran a brief and unscientific poll last week, much to Cath’s chagrin. It wasn’t as bad as she would have you believe, because I actually did think about the questions in those couple of teeth-brushing minutes, and figured I could pull out some information: obviously a more sophisticated and less self-selecting poll would be more valuable, but we’re talking about Twitter here, for goodness’ sake.
Anyway, let’s have a look.
Profession of Twitterers (or ‘Scientwists’)
Given the way the question was phrased, and the possibility of an ‘ex-bench scientist’ being also one of the other categories, I was not surprised to find that the numbers from the ‘professions’ category did not match the numbers in ‘disciplines’. However, it’s pretty obvious that of the ~80 respondents, about two thirds self-identified as research scientists. Not many medics—but quite a few people who have left scientific research.
Self-discipline
I’ve always suspected that biologists were pretty web-savvy, even back in the dark days of Gopher and NCSA Mosaic. More twitterers self-identified as ‘bioscience’ than all the other categories combined. These data should be interpreted with caution because those who saw the poll are probably more likely to be biological scientists anyway, simply because my two seed twitterers (rpg7twit and f1000), and hence their followers, are biomedical. Perhaps this result is not, then, that surprising.
Professional vs personal use
This result surprised me a little bit. It seems that most scientwists mix and match business and pleasure. Only nine votes—a bit over 10%—claimed separate work/personal accounts.
If I get a round tuit, I’ll re-do this poll in a more sensible way, and get some non-squishies to seed it. Maybe I could present this at SoLoConf ’09?
All my supplementary information is freely available online.
since there are so many biosci types responding, maybe you could also ask them what their favorite animal is? perhaps they can post part of their favorite animal’s CytB sequence? (silly? well, i’d like to know the answer to this question).
Brilliant idea Grrl!
Hmm I agree with Grrl – perhaps there should be a hashtag… how about #favcytb
Surely your sampling methodology is severely flawed? In my experience, the majority of biologists are not particularly web-savvy – this is a heavily skewed sample. this isn’t necessarily a criticism, just a comment.
Interesting. The biologists I’ve known — and when I say ‘biologist’ I’m including molecular, cellular, structural etc. — have been very technosavvy.
Richard B. – one of our people said the same thing yesterday, viz. that biologists were slow at cottoning on to new web technologies. I was a bit surprised, but I suppose it depends who you compare them to. Compared with physicists I think they are a bit slow. Compared to other sciences I think they do well. As Richard G. points out, “biology” is a broad church. Perhaps some areas are more tuned in than others?
Regarding the person who said this to me yesterday, I couldn’t help thinking that he was perhaps seeking to draw attention to the fact that he (a biologist) was very tech-savvy and clearly a cut above the average. But maybe I was just having an off-day (I was).
I can’t see Twittering being much use for facilitating a scientist’s daily tasks. It’s a good distraction from them, though. But not quite as social as the real-world alternative (tea).
mmm tea.
oh! And Grrl says …
I never mix business with pleasure. Ever. You know this.
But business is your pleasure. Or vice versa.
Indubitably.
Here’s a song about Twitter. I was just going to past the video, but it would probably be spam filtered, so I have to type words and stuff.