13 Jun 2016

Effects of sharing research on social media

As a part of my blogposts on "reflective librarianship" I have now focused my interest on testing if my own social media apperance "BusinessLib" influence, and if so to what extent, the research communication of OA published research articles in our digital repository DiVA.


First I selected two different articles published by researchers from JIBS in DiVA. The two articles where published as OA in mid April and the difference between the two was that the first one had nearly none (4 downloads) after 8 weeks and the second one had have a more successful start (26 downloads) after 8 weeks.


My experiment  was to see if I published information about the articles (article title, hashtags, a photo of the authors and link to the fulltext) on my "BusinessLib" social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) would that effect the number of downloads for the articles one week afterwards?


Actually, I was a little suprised! It seems that my action had a real impact on the diffusion of the research articles. The first article moved from 4 downloads 8 weeks after publishing in DiVA to 36 dowloads (+ 900%) in DiVA just one week after my publishing on social media. The second one which started out on higher level moved from 26 downloads 8 weeks after it has been published in DiVA to 67 downloads (+ 258%) only one week after I had shared it on my social media channels.


My thoughts on this:
  • Social media increases the impact of research results
  • Hashtags and a link to fulltext gets downloads
  • Research communication is an important part of a researchers work
  • As a librarian I can be part of the diffusion of research
What is your thoughts on this small and simple experiment?







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