Twitter for Scientists: an Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come?

Tweeting has long posed a dilemma for scientists.

There’s abundant evidence that widely sharing a research finding in just one or two simple sentences greatly increases its use and effectiveness.

But, ugh, that usually means Twitter — in the eyes of many, a low-attention-span cesspool of trolls, political partisans, and amateur comedians known more for braggadocio and snark than reason and facts.

Now, with federal backing, there’s another option.

Known as Polyplexus, meaning “a network of many,” it’s a compilation of 300-character summaries of research findings, created with the idea of driving crossfield discoveries and spawning public and private funding for follow-up studies.

Unlike Twitter, it’s meant to be “a professional environment for research-and-development professionals,” said a Polyplexus developer, John A. Main, a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.

Darpa and its $3-billion annual budget operate well beyond the military realm, and Polyplexus is an example. The newly established website is based on the sense that all fields of science and technology could move faster if researchers spent less time on the between-projects chores of synthesizing and disseminating findings.

“You’re not going to accelerate a research project once it starts,” said Main, a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Kentucky. “The time to accelerate it is before it starts — you want to get to the start date faster than you’ve ever done before, and that’s what we’re going after.”

How eagerly scientists will actually use it is an open question.

The first researcher to submit a posting to Polyplexus — known as a “micropub,” or micropublication — was Victor A. Benjamin, an assistant professor of business at Arizona State University. In his submission Benjamin summarized a 2016 study by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology who found that even a small number of false online reviews can significantly harm a hotel.

Benjamin said he had written that micropub, even though he wasn’t part of the team that conducted the hotel-review study, largely because Darpa, in a bid to publicize Polyplexus, is promising several $100,000 grants based on ideas that are derived from micropubs. It’s one of about a dozen micropubs that Benjamin submitted to Polyplexus within its first week of operation.

Once that introductory-grant incentive vanishes, Benjamin said, he’s not sure how active he’ll be on the site. A relative newcomer to the business school, he is an expert in machine learning and computational linguistics, studying how to mine useful intelligence from online conversations. His academic experience to date, he said, validates Darpa’s understanding of the need to somehow accelerate the scientific process.

In his days as a graduate student in computer science, Benjamin said, social media was necessary to keep current on machine-learning technology. As a professor, though, engaging with platforms such as Twitter has struck Benjamin as a far lower priority than getting published in traditional academic journals.

The ‘Guy in His Garage’

That calculation appears especially common in places such as the business school, Benjamin said. As in many fields, he said, business-school incentives tend to reward journal-publication rates and private-sector contract work that offers limited value to the outside world. “A lot of them are not interested in it,” he said, describing his business-school colleagues and their attitudes toward social media.

That reflects a common misprioritization in academe, said Andrew M. Ibrahim, a University of Michigan medical doctor who studies ways to cut costs and improve quality in health care. Ibrahim advocates not only that scientists use social-media platforms such as Twitter, but also that they use them better. He co-authored a study, published last year in the Annals of Surgery, that showed tweets with a graphic data summary attract eight times as many views as do tweets that provide only the title of a journal article.

“It’s worth a couple of more hours of your time to put it in clear-enough form that makes your work more accessible,” said Ibrahim, a staff surgeon at the university.

With or without the graphical element, the process of whittling down a research finding to a concise thought helps authors improve both their writing and their scientific thinking, Ibrahim said. Some scientists, after attending a workshop on producing more-effective tweets, have found they want to rewrite the journal articles they’ve been trying to describe, he said. “It’s a hidden curriculum of teaching people to write more clearly,” Ibrahim said of the workshop.

That’s one insight that motivated Michael J. Goldblatt, an entrepreneur and former Darpa official who came up with the Polyplexus concept and now has a Darpa contract to build its web presence. “The idea of trying to create research into digestible chunks to drive citations and drive understanding and learning is a very useful thing,” said Goldblatt, whose career has also included a stint teaching law at the University of California at Davis.

Goldblatt’s and Darpa’s more central goal, however, is to greatly expand the active scientific community, beyond the usual suspects in academic or corporate settings. Although participation in Polyplexus is limited to academic scientists, Darpa plans to open it to anyone involved in legitimate scientific exploration, including the proverbial “guy in his garage,” Goldblatt said.

From Evidence to Conjecture

How to judge legitimacy? Darpa plans to subject each proposed micropub to a three-question vote in which other participants must agree on the baseline quality of its evidence and sourcing.

And beginning next month, participants will be asked to take two existing micropubs describing a research finding (known as “evidence micropubs”) and create another (known as a “conjecture micropub”) that briefly describes a key relationship or synthesis of the two evidence micropubs. The hope, Main said, is to make the writing of conjecture micropubs a curiosity-driven game — the kind of thing someone might do with idle time on a phone while riding a train.

For the third and final stage of Polyplexus, Main said, both public and private funders of science will be asked to read the theories outlined in the conjecture micropubs and see them as ideas for financing future research projects.

At the moment, however, the funders — even Darpa’s fellow federal science agencies — seem a bit tentative. Only three companies have signed up to work with Darpa on Polyplexus. No government agencies have done so.

Initial interest among researchers appears a bit better. A first round of 260 invitations to college and university scientists has attracted 64 registered users of Polyplexus. Benjamin is not sure how many more of his fellow scientists will join, though he sees good reasons for them to consider it, especially if they are still early in their careers. Research funding tends to flow to scientists and fields with existing connections to decision makers, Benjamin said, and Polyplexus might start to redraw those lines. For scientists hunting opportunities, he said, “maybe this could help them break in.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.