Ogden, Lesley Evans. "Tags, Blogs, Tweets: Social Media as Science Tool?" BioScience 63 (2013): 148.
From the article: "Is social media changing the way we do science—even
speeding it up? Preliminary data, and a growing number of cases, suggest that
the answer is yes.
One now-famous example of its growing ubiquity is the
social media storm that followed the publication of a NASA-funded paper in the
journal Science, on 2 December 2010 (doi:10.1126/science.1197258). The
authors of the paper claimed to have discovered a bacterium that could
substitute arsenic in place of phosphate as a key nutrient necessary to support
life.
Rosie Redfield, zoology professor at the University of
British Columbia (UBC), wasn’t buying it, and said so on her blog. Ironically,
this was a communication platform that UBC graduate students chose to parody,
along with Redfield, at their Christmas party. Asking the fake Redfield,
“What’s a blog?” the reply was, “it’s a publication that nobody reads, not even
reviewers.” Their mockery was to be quickly proved wrong." Read more
