Communicating science: the use of public social networks by Brazilian scientific journals in the Area “Communication and Information”

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

In 2002, with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the scientific community in many countries began to support actions in favor of Open Access to scientific knowledge. Since then, other attitudes have emerged, such as the definition of guidelines for the reproducibility of studies and the opening of research data, based on conducting more collaborative scientific research and democratizing access to its results, culminating in Open Science practices. As for this democratization, scientific journals are the most used channels for communicating the results of studies, therefore they have the potential to also inform such results to the non-specialized public, giving evidence to scientists and their institutions.

Objective:

To analyze the engagement of posts made on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by scientific journals evaluated with Qualis A1 and A2, by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (2017-2020), in the “Communication and Information” area and whether the posts have content intelligible to the non-specialized public.

Methodology:

Informational survey, content analysis and calculation of engagement of journal pages and posts on the aforementioned social networks. Seven journals were identified, and 341 posts made between August 2022 and January 2023 were analyzed, of which 173 were categorized as “Promotion of scientific manuscript, number or volume”, of interest to the study.

Results:

The social network Facebook has a greater number of followers in the profiles of all the journals surveyed, but when calculating engagement versus number of followers, Instagram and Twitter appear with a higher percentage of interactions. In all public social networks polls, the "comment" tool is little used. Most posts like “Promotion of a scientific manuscript, number or volume” are an image with the title of the article and the names of the authors, with parts of the abstract of the work in the description, with the exception of a journal that publishes the manuscripts with videos of the authors themselves, which explain the content of the research.

Conclusion:

With the calculation of the engagement of the posts and its relationship with the number of followers of the pages, it is concluded that journals have the potential to use public social networks to reach the lay public, as long as they consider the main question of scientific dissemination: who is it intended for?

KEYWORDS:
Scientific communication; Scientific dissemination; Scientific journals; Open Science