Analysing the effectiveness of Twitter as an equitable community communication tool for international conferences

Scientific conferences increasingly include online aspects. Some are moving to be entirely virtual whilst others are adopting hybrid models in which there are both in-person and virtual elements. This development of opportunities for people to attend conferences virtually has the potential to both reduce their environmental impact and to make access to them more equitable. An issue with virtual conference participation that has been raised, however, is that there is a reduction in informal communication between attendees. This is an important deficit as informal contacts play a significant role in both knowledge transmission and professional network development. One forum where some informal communication around conferences does occur is Twitter, with participation there being encouraged by some conferences. It is not clear, however, how effective Twitter is as a community communication tool in terms of equitable participation amongst conference attendees. To investigate this, we looked at Twitter usage surrounding four international conferences between 2010 and 2021. It was found that engagement with conference hashtags increased steadily over time, peaking in 2019. Users represented 9% of conference attendees and were primarily located in Europe and North America, communicating primarily in English (97% of tweets). Hub nodes within the interaction network were also primarily located in these regions. East Asia had fewer users than would be expected based on neuroscience publication numbers from that region. What users there were in East Asia were engaged with less than were users in other regions. It was found that the overall interaction network showed a rich-club structure, where users with more connections tend to interact more with others with similar connection numbers. Finally, it was found that users in Europe and North America tend to communicate with other users in their own regions whereas users in the rest of the world direct their interactions out of their region. These results suggest that although conference-related Twitter use has been successful to some degree in opening up access, there are some notable limitations in its usage that may mirror aspects of inequality inherent to in-person conferences. How to build equitable informal communication networks around virtual conferences remains a challenging question that requires further discussion.

Barriers and Facilitators for Conducting Implementation Science in German-Speaking Countries: Findings from the Promote ImpSci Interview Study

On a global scale, implementation science has developed considerably as a discipline in recent years. In German-speaking countries, the field has been gaining significance as well, but respective efforts in building capacity and advancing the research infrastructure are still rare. The present study investigates barriers and facilitators for conducting implementation science in German-speaking countries with the goal of formulating recommendations for creating a more supportive research infrastructure. We conducted an interview study with nine well-established implementation researchers affiliated with universities in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland. The interviews were held via Zoom or phone in November and December 2020, transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis. Barriers that relate to characteristics of the discipline were difficulties in building a common understanding of the field and the complexity of implementation research projects. Although supportive scientific networks were important facilitators, interviewees mentioned challenges in connecting with likeminded researchers. A further barrier was the lack of opportunities for education and training in implementation science, especially in the German language. Also, participants reported a missing readiness in academia for establishing implementation science that should be addressed by advocacy of the discipline toward academic decision makers. Moreover, since most national funding agencies prioritize basic research over applied research, some interviewees named flexibility in handling research funds as a facilitator for implementation research. The results inform an agenda for promoting implementation science in German-speaking countries and can be beneficial to other countries that are currently advancing their implementation research capacity and infrastructure.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43477-022-00046-3.

Population Cycles, Disease, and Networks of Ecological Knowledge

Wildlife populations in the northern reaches of the globe have long been observed to fluctuate or cycle periodically, with dramatic increases followed by catastrophic crashes. Focusing on the early work of Charles S. Elton, this article analyzes how investigations into population cycles shaped the development of Anglo-American animal ecology during the 1920s-1930s. Population cycling revealed patterns that challenged ideas about the "balance" of nature; stimulated efforts to quantify population data; and brought animal ecology into conversation with intellectual debates about natural selection. Elton used the problem of understanding wildlife population cycles to explore a central tension in ecological thought: the relative influences of local conditions (food supply, predation) and universal forces (such as climate change and natural selection) in regulating wild animal populations. He also sought patronage and built research practices and the influential Bureau of Animal Population around questions of population regulation during the 1930s. Focusing on disease as a local population regulator that could interact with global climatic influences, Elton facilitated an interdisciplinary and population-based approach in early animal ecology. Elton created a network of epidemiologists, conservationists, pathologists and mathematicians, who contributed to population cycle research. I argue that, although these people often remained peripheral to ecology, their ideas shaped the young discipline. Particularly important were the concepts of abundance, density, and disease; and the interactions between these factors and natural selection. However, Elton's reliance on density dependence unwittingly helped set up conditions conducive to the development of controversies in animal ecology in later years. While ecologists did not come to consensus on the ultimate causes of population cycles, this phenomenon was an important early catalyst for the development of theory and practice in animal ecology.

The evolution of research collaboration within and across disciplines in Italian Academia

In sociology of science much attention is dedicated to the study of scientific networks, especially to co-authorship and citations in publications. Other trends of research have investigated the advantages, limits, performances and difficulties of interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly advocated by the main lines of public research funding. This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary research in Italy over 10 years of scientific collaboration on research projects. Instead of looking at the output of research, i.e. publications, we analyse the original research proposals that have been funded by the Ministry of University and Research for a specific line of funding, the Research Projects of National Interest. In particular, we want to see how much interdisciplinary research has been conducted during the period under analysis and how changes in the overall amount of public funding might have affected disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. We also want to cluster the similarities and differences of the amount of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and see if it changes over time. Finally, we want to see if interdisciplinary projects receive an increasing share of funding compared to their disciplinary bounded counterparts. Our results indicate that while interdisciplinary research diminishes along the years, potentially responding to the contraction of public funding, research that cut across disciplinary boundaries overall receives more funding than research confined within disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, the clustering procedure do not indicate clear and stable distinction between disciplines, but similar patterns of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration are shown by discipline with common epistemological frameworks, which share compatible epistemologies of scientific investigations. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of our findings for research policies and practices and by discussing future research in this area.