The potential of social media such as Twitter has been dubbed transformational. However, most of these effects have been studied in the political, social or technological sphere. Its impact on scholarship remains under-researched. The paper explores how academics use Twitter as part of their scholarly activities. A qualitative approach based on an interpretative methodology was adopted for the study, and data gathered through 28 semi-structured interviews with academic staff who regularly use Twitter for academic and non-academic purposes. The findings uncover the rich benefits that enthusiasts gain from use of Twitter as an information source for scholarly communication – in the context of creation, usage and sharing of scholarly information. This was manifested in academics’ information-seeking behaviour in with links to networking and collaboration as part of scientific practice.

中文翻译：

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揭示 Twitter 在学术界的学术用途：一所英国大学的经验

Twitter 等社交媒体的潜力被称为变革性的。然而，大多数这些影响都在政治、社会或技术领域进行了研究。它对学术的影响仍未得到充分研究。该论文探讨了学术界如何使用 Twitter 作为其学术活动的一部分。该研究采用了基于解释性方法的定性方法，数据是通过对经常使用 Twitter 进行学术和非学术目的的学术人员进行的 28 次半结构化访谈收集的。调查结果揭示了爱好者从使用 Twitter 作为学术交流的信息来源——在学术信息的创建、使用和共享的背景下获得的丰富好处。