Unicamp researcher is co-author of paper suggesting English for Twitter and local languages for Facebook
Editors of scientific journals and authors of socially relevant articles must use social networks to share research results, but in different ways: to Facebook, in the language of the populations most interested in these results, such as Portuguese and Spanish; and for Twitter, English, to reach a wider audience or speak to peers. This is what one suggests paper published in PLOS One analyzing articles about Zika virus published in the first half of 2016, written by Germana Barata (Brazil), Kenneth Shores (USA) and Juan Pablo Alperin (Canada).
“We wanted to investigate how a relevant research topic at both a national and international level would have been shared on social media, in order to understand the impact on the public of scientific research published in the form of articles”, explains Germana Barata, researcher at the Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor) and the Creativity Development Center (Nudecri) at Unicamp, and visiting researcher at Simon Fraser University (Canada).
Germana considers the Zika virus an interesting example due to the importance it gained in February 2016, when it was considered an international emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO). “At the time, Brazil would host the Olympic Games and thousands of foreigners, while cases of the disease had been multiplying in the country since the previous year. We also wanted a topic in which Brazil would have a leading role in scientific development – we have great expertise and a good volume of scientific publications on neglected diseases, such as Zika.”
According to the researcher, she and her partners searched for articles whose keyword was “zika” from January to June 2016, the same period in which the disease reached its peak and public interest was at its peak. “We searched for academic documents in the Altmetric database, a British company that produces altmetrics data (alternative metrics that measure how scientific documents are shared in the online universe, such as social networks, blogs, Wikipedia, journalistic news sites, etc.). The articles identified are those shared on the social networks of interest to us, Twitter and Facebook.”
Germana Barata justifies that Twitter has been the most studied social network from an altmetrics point of view. “Twitter data is easier to access, more transparent and, therefore, it ends up attracting more attention from scholars in this field of research; It is also considered a more professional social network. Facebook is still the most popular social network in the world, although extracting data from it is more complicated and limited. In general, we only have access (via Altmetric) to posts that shared the link to a social article from public groups or institutional pages. Even so, I have the perception of a growing use of Facebook professionally and not just personally, as some studies show (see Noorden, 2014).”
Among the main findings, the Unicamp researcher highlights that although English is the language most used by people who share articles and scientific documents about the Zika virus, there is little chance that this information will reach the most affected populations. “In the period studied, the most affected were populations from Brazil and Latin American countries, for example. It is true that on Facebook the percentage of English language drops considerably, with 24% of posts in other languages, indicating the concern about sharing news in local languages. We know that social relationships on Facebook are closer.”
Twitter, concludes Germana Barata, is recognized by those who share articles about Zika as a more international environment. “But we had an interesting result when we related the authors of the articles with their country of origin and the languages used: even though the majority of publications were in English, in the case of Brazilian authors, for example, there are greater chances of sharing in Portuguese, indicating that the article is relevant to the country or the concern to circulate it within one’s own social circle.”
