Fostering Social Project Impact with Twitter: Current Usage and Perspectives

Social impact assessment has become a major concern within the research community. While different methodological advancements have been made to better display, as well as to measure, achieved impacts, social media has proved to be a potential domain to generate many new opportunities to support bot...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mirjana Pejić Bach, Cristina M. Pulido, Dalia Suša Vugec, Vladia Ionescu, Gisela Redondo-Sama, Laura Ruiz-Eugenio
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
Series:Sustainability
Subjects:
FP7
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/15/6290
Description
Summary:Social impact assessment has become a major concern within the research community. While different methodological advancements have been made to better display, as well as to measure, achieved impacts, social media has proved to be a potential domain to generate many new opportunities to support both the communication as well as the realization of social impact. Within this context, the current research presents an analysis of how Twitter is used among a subset of research projects to maximize social impact. The research focuses on the use of Twitter, as one of the most often used social media, by the members of scientific projects funded under one part of the FP7 funding framework of the European Union called Science in Society. The data were analyzed using NVivo, and WordStat Provalis software. The results presented in this study include exploratory data analysis, topic mining and the analysis of the impact of projects on Twitter<b>. </b>The results indicate moderate use of Twitter among the observed projects, but with a strong focus on the dissemination of project results, thus indicating a trend towards the usage of social media for communicating the social impact of research projects.
ISSN:2071-1050