ResearchGate, a Q&A site that soon became known as ‘Facebook for scientists‘, has announced its intention to function as a publishing platform for scientific researchers and offer an alternative measure of reputation in that community.

Started in 2008 with few features, ResearchGate was reshaped with feedback from scientists and has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook. According to the website, more than 1.9 million scientists currently share papers, publish data and engage in discussions on its platform. Now an ‘RG Score’ has been designed to make those interactions visible and quantifiable.

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In response to static, neglected lab websites that have become the norm, a Princeton scientist (Ethan O. Perlstein) has personally invested in the design of a site that will inspire fellow academics to openly share their research. In addition, with his academic appointment coming to an end, http://perlsteinlab.com/ is a great way to establish a personal brand.

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For those looking improve engagement with their Facebook posts, it seems that adding more pictures and speaking in the first person is a good place to start. Social media ‘scientist’ Dan Zarrella has tracked and analysed more than 1.3 million posts from the 10,000 most-liked Facebook pages. He has created an infographic (see below) showing what kind of posts perform best on Facebook in terms of likes, shares and comments.

Photos perform best across the board, followed by text and video, according to the data. News links bring in the lowest number of likes, shares and comments. In opposition to Twitter, posts with a high number of self-referential words such as “I” and “me” get more likes .  “It’s also important to be passionate, not neutral,” which means that both positive and negative posts tend to do well. more…

You may (or may not) have noticed that having blogged every Friday for over 2 years, there was a distinct lack of activity on the BMJ Web Development blog last week. Was I out enjoying the sunshine? Absolutely not. I was in the office researching the best time to disseminate blog posts on social media networks, of course.

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As part of the longstanding strategy to position LinkedIn as a marketing platform for brands, a new program has been released that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages. The option is similar to Liking a brand on Facebook or following them on Twitter. Followers will receive automatic updates from the brand through their LinkedIn feeds.

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Three new image quizzes have been launched by BMJ Group, covering real-life cases in Paediatrics, Sports Medicine and Emergency Medicine. The image quizzes provide an opportunity for you to use the clinical images from the following journals to test your diagnostic skills.

• Archives of Disease in Childhood
• British Journal of Sports Medicine
• Emergency Medicine Journal

New images and questions appear regularly, along with several possible answers. Before selecting an answer, you can take a closer look by using the zooming function. Once you have identified the correct answer, additional information is displayed to provide further context on the diagnosis, along with any relevant references.

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A host of journal editors and industry experts descended upon BMA House yesterday to discuss the latest techniques and developments in reader engagement. Highlights included a lively debate on post-publication peer review, an inspiring presentation by Twitter Journal Club founder Natalie Silvey (@silv24), encouraging advice on developing a comprehensive journal web presence by Karim Khan, and predictions for the future of social networking by Tad Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of NEJM.

Given the central theme of social media throughout the day, perhaps the most fitting way to capture the event is by following the surrounding conversation on Twitter. According to TweetReach, the stream below reached in excess of 27,000 users – quite an achievement!
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“As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest,” the altmetrics manifesto argues. “Unfortunately, scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing.” Peer review “has served scholarship well” but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher’s performance, which it wasn’t designed to do.

There are various tools that provide an easy interface for finding out readership metrics for a researcher. Until recently, none of these allowed users to choose what is included or enabled non-traditional artefacts to be combined with traditional ones. This is where Total-Impact, a new offering from the altmetric community, comes in. more…

Twitter received a major update in December and is gradually rolling out a brand-new look with a host of new features. The update is arguably the most comprehensive and wide-ranging change since the microblogging service was launched in 2006.

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A new paper is kicking up a storm in the world of altmetrics (a community that seeks to incorporate social coverage in the assessment of scholarly impact). Analysing the relationship between social metrics and more traditional measures, the study by Gunther Eysenbach in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) concludes that highly tweeted papers are more likely to become highly cited.

Not surprisingly, the article, “Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact,” has been tweeted 575 times, and if Eysenbach’s findings prove true, should receive a fair number of citations.

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