Open to influence: what counts as academic influence in scholarly networked<i>Twitter</i>participation

Abstract

AbstractWithin the academy, signals of a scholar's academic influence are made manifest in indices like the h-index, which rank output. In open scholarly networks, however, signals of influence are less codified, and the ways in which they are enacted and understood have yet to be articulated. Yet the influence scholars cultivate in open networked publics intersects with institutional academia in grant-required measures of 'public impact', in media visibility, and in keynote and job opportunities. How do scholars within open networks judge whether another scholar's signals are credible or worthy of engagement? What counts as academic influence on a platform like Twitter? This paper concludes that scholars employ complex logics of influence to assess the networked profiles and behaviors of peers and unknown entities. Significantly, these logics of influence depart from the codified terms of rank and bibliometric indexing on which conventional academic influence is judged. While some are numeric – participants recognized relatively large-scale accounts as a general signal of influence – recognizability and commonality are as important as or more important than quantifiable measures or credentials. The paper suggests that the impression of capacity for meaningful contribution is key to cultivating influence and the regard of actively networked peers.Keywords: networked influenceopen scholarshipnetworked scholarshipnetworked publicsscholarly reputationacademic influence AcknowledgementsI want to thank the study's participants, who offered their time, their frankness, and their ongoing support, and the exemplar identities, who were willing to open themselves to others' public assessment, for walking down this road with me. Special thanks to Kate Bowles for offering me backchannel mentorship and care from halfway around the world from the very first days of the official study; to my dissertation committee, Sandy McAuley, Udo Krautwurst, and Alec Couros, for their guidance; to my own network, for providing half of these references; and to my partner Dave Cormier, for always having had a bigger Twitter account than me and thus sparking this curiosity way way back in 2007.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.FundingThis work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships, and the University of Prince Edward Island BMO Graduate Student Research Scholarship.Notes on contributorBonnie Stewart is a lecturer and social media researcher in the Faculty of Education at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.Notes1. Altmetrics are measures which assess the impact of online scholarly activities both within and beyond the realm of traditional academic publishing, including but not limited to the numeric reach and engagement of scholarly outputs.2. Paper.li are collections of headlines and links that are created and published daily as personalized mini-newspapers. They are automatically curated from around the web and broadcast through users' social media channels.