Can Twitter be used as a mode of knowledge transfer for scholarly communication

Scholarly communication is regarded as a process of publication of peer-reviewed research (Thorin, 2006). A broader interpretation is that scholarly communication includes the researchers’ everyday activities and thus encompasses several processes such as ‘conducting research, developing research ideas and informal research communications; preparing, modeling and communicating what will become formal research outputs; disseminating formal research products; managing personal careers, research teams and research programmes; as well as communicating scholarly ideas to broader communities’ (Procter et al, 2010: 4040). Technological advancements brought Web 2.0 tools that allow users not only to interactively create and share content in a social manner, but also communicate freely via social media. As a form of communication, social media including blogs and wikis as well as social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter have become entrenched in modern society (Chaudhry et al, 2012). Consequently, social media has become a cultural entity amongst its user groups. However, Procter et al (2010) found that many researchers are not willing to embrace social media, particularly SNS. It is not surprising to find that many researchers are still not using social media. This could be attributed to the view that social media is a dais with latent communication challenges. These challenges comprise, among others, an absence of authority from the communicators (Metzgar & Maruggi, 2009) because people often use pseudonyms; the possible loss of message control (Johnson & Perlmutter, 2010) because anyone is at liberty to communicate anything, anyhow, anywhere; thus resulting into confusion on conceptualizations (Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Scholars, experts and researchers alike might question whether the overall use of social media, particularly SNS actually has any impact when it comes to their desired end result. For instance, a scholar would ask if using the SNS has an impact on citation of publications? Despite these challenges and questions, social media because of their increasing proliferation offer researchers a mode to disseminate their research, increase their professional profile, and present their findings to the public (Bik & Goldstein, 2013). Twitter is one of the micro-blogging public SNS viewed as a system that helps create and maintain short messages called tweets. Tweets are 140 characters in length (Ross et al, 2011) that can be discovered through Twitter search tools (Procter et al, 2013a) by using the popular hashtag (#) such as #scholar to find tweets with the topic or theme ‘scholar’. Although the tweets are extremely short, Twitter offers new possibilities for information updates and exchange, fulfilling a demand for a faster and more immediate mode of communication than regular blogging (Ross et al, 2011). However, the limited characters of Twitter add uncertainty to scholars that are already reluctant to embrace social media because one may wonder if such as short message can be of any value. Chaudhry et al (2012) observe that time and technical limitations, coupled with skepticism regarding the general value of Twitter, are limitations to its3broader adoption. However, there are situations that have proved Twitter to be of value such as the discovery of pandemic outbreaks through Twitter – e.g. HINI (Chew & Eysenbach, 2010) symbolizes the value of Twitter in public health. The revolution and uprising of Libya is another example showing the potential of Twitter and other social media in mobilizing people in a short space of time. Perhaps situating Twitter as a form of everyday writing within a historical framework of diaries, will help the skeptics better understand Twitter as a communication system of value (Humphreys et al, 2013). Libraries, universities and multitudes of organisations embrace Twitter as part of their overall free proactive marketing strategy; because Twitter is tantamount to ‘an electronic word of mouth (Mostafa, 2013) that scholars could take advantage of to promote their scholarly communication.Considering Twitter as a versatile tool that can be employed for marketing, communication, teaching and learning as well as research; and bearing in mind the skeptics of social media, the Library and Information Studies Centre (LISC), University of Cape Town created a Twitter handle @UCTLisc in May 2013. As a professional Library and Information Studies school that values excellence in scholarship, it is imperative for LISC to maintain such integrity even on the SNS. Twitter like other SNS is a flexible and ever-increasing network of users and its volatility requires constant research and exploration to better understand its potential for scholarship and engagement in communities of practice (Procter et al, 2013a). The task required not only literature review, but also monitoring of LISC on Twitter as well as observations of other individuals and institutions on social media to build knowledge capacity on the best practices. Being in academia one has a major question: Can Twitter be used as a mode of knowledge transfer in scholarly communication?