Scientific communication on Twitter

authorship, function and prototypical structures of academics in Chile

Abstract

With the irruption of the Internet 30 years ago, the forms of communication in society have changed widely, including the way in which science is communicated. Specifically, researchers, traditionally reluctant to participate in more informative communication, have been changing their position in recent times based on positive empirical evidence on the contribution of social networks to the impact of scientific communication, without however, there is little knowledge about the impact of authorship, its structures and its functions. For this reason, this research sought to compare the structure of scientific communication carried out on Twitter by researchers — women and men — from two Chilean universities, one private and one public, through the tweets published on their personal accounts. The results show that the prototypical structures and the functions assigned to these tweets are associated with an underutilization of the potential of the Twitter platform in researchers from both public and private institutions.