When Social Media Meets Scholarly Publishing

Reputation has always been important in academia, but given the rise of social media, it has become a much more complex topic. Professional reputation, based upon factors like publications, might now be influenced by personal reputation, based upon factors like tweets and Facebook posts. Nowhere is this interaction more visible than in the recent decision of LinkedIn, a professional networking site best known as a job-hunting tool, to buy Pulse, a news aggregator (Isaac 2013). The purchase potentially obliterated the line between news-gathering and social networking, uniting the two into a single concept. LinkedIn users will not be using social media to locate news so much as they will find news integrated into social media. For LinkedIn users, there probably will be no easy way to separate one’s online persona (or one of one’s online personas) from one’s news consumption. While LinkedIn is not an academic institution, the trend is occurring across academia. Witness the rise of Academia.edu, a social networking site for academics and their work. There is also a social component to many citation management tools, like Mendeley, citeulike, and Zotero. Not to mention the social element that’s a part of products like Commons in a Box, a closed, self-hosted social network product for universities. Although it’s thought of as a private industry issue, social media is an increasingly important part of life in the academy. This is evident in the rise of the altmetrics movement, which is attempting to measure the reach of scholarly work using newer social media tools, rather than traditional methods, like citation impact and Hirsch number. A 2012 editorial from Nature Materials examined the phenomenon, announcing “although spontaneous reviews from readers and novel altmetrics are welcomed complimentary evaluation tools, they will not replace a thorough scientific quality assessment of papers and scientists through a