POLÍTICA COMERCIAL EN EL ECUADOR

Researchers described cases where the shared articles provided inspirations, guidelines, or support to change their research practices.

P7 shared an article on open access and had one of her students lead the discussion in the weekly lab meeting to talk more about open access in research. Being an ecologist, she continued to work with her university library on topics related to open access and institutional repositories.

P1 talked about attending a conference presentation, where she learned more about better practices in research data management and sharing. P8 shared a story behind an article on data transparency that he shared on Twitter. In P8’s research, he conducted experiments with zebrafish, during which he gradually felt the need and potential benefit of having a large

database integrating zebrafish related research data in a wide range of research projects. After he read this article on data transparency, he tried to work with one of his colleagues to build a

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nation-wide consortium based on which an open database of zebrafish related data could be shared. Although the consortium did not work out by the time of the interview, he still thought it would be beneficial to zebrafish related research in his country to have such a database. P10 also discussed how he was trying to see how he could follow the practice guidelines recommended by one of the articles he shared for better research reproducibility and data reusability in this

research. P11 discussed how an article about research data management inspired her to start working on improving the automation of storing and managing the research data in her work.

5.6.4 Beyond Research

Beyond research, researchers talked about using the articles they shared on Twitter in their teaching, mentoring, and other activities.

5.6.4.1 Used in Teaching

Researchers used articles they shared on Twitter in their teaching as reading materials or examples. A few researchers reported that one of the articles they shared was what they used in their teaching “all the time.” P10 shared an article based on which his former lab mate developed an important lesson plan for middle school students. One of the articles P16 shared was on the rubber tail illusion phenomenon in mice. He had demonstrated this experiment multiple times in his class. Two researchers commented that they should and would incorporate one of the articles mentioned in this interview in their current teaching.

5.6.4.2 Used in Mentoring

Researchers also used articles they shared on Twitter in their mentoring work. They reported recommending the articles to their students to read and discuss. This included not only articles relevant to their students’ research content but also in research practices. For instance, P7 commented, “I am also modeling how to do research for my students.”

164 5.6.4.3 Used in Practices

Researchers described cases where the shared articles were used in their practical activities. Particularly, in many cases of P4 and P9’s, they used the articles to provide data- driven or evidence-driven recommendations for practitioners and practicing physicians. In their cases, all of the articles were in medical and health-related domains.

P7 remembered mentioning one of the articles she tweeted in a committee meeting in a human-wildlife conflict conference. The findings of that article provided some evidence on a better understanding of this subject matter.

Researchers also reported using the articles to engage more attention in their research fields. For instance, two articles shared by P11 she frequently used when introducing the importance of her research to lay audiences or researchers in other fields. P15 developed a blog post based on one of the articles he shared to promote computational approaches in the field of chemistry. P16 introduced the findings of one of the articles he shared on Twitter in his popular science book.

5.6.5 Potential Impact

In addition to the various types of impact discussed in the previous sections, there were also cases where researchers commented that the articles they shared would potentially impact their research activities. For instance, P2 shared an article introducing a tool that he wanted to learn and use in his research. He commented, “I didn’t specifically have the expertise in this area, but I could see this tool could be very helpful for my research further down the line.”

Some other researchers indicated that some articles they shared would potentially impact their research, but they “did not have time for it yet” or “did not go that direction” (e.g., P2, P5, P3, P9, P10, P12, P14, P17, P18). In these cases, these articles were generally related to their

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research areas but not directly related to their research projects. For instance, P5 mentioned that he should revisit one of the articles he shared because it became very relevant to his current research. In some cases, researchers were not able to use the articles in their research because of other uncontrollable reasons. For instance, P17 commented that if she were able to have access to the data used in one of the articles she shared, she could be able to apply her analytic approach in that data, which might lead to new findings.

There were a few cases where researchers reported that the articles they shared on Twitter might lead to potential collaborations in the future, depending on the focus of their future

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CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION 6.1 Summary of Findings

This dissertation study explored researchers’ activities around scholarly articles on Twitter. Using a mixed-methods design, this study analyzed data collected from a large-scale survey and twenty semi-structured interviews. The Critical Incident Technique was used as part of the interview study to learn about the full stories behind researchers’ sharing of scholarly articles on Twitter. Through the lens of the exploratory framework of Digital Trace of Scholarly Acts (DTSA), this study contributed to a better understanding of the digital traces left by

researchers on Twitter by providing richer descriptions and narratives of their activities.

The following four sections briefly summarize and discuss the results for each of the four research questions.

6.1.1 What opinions do researchers have on the scholarly articles they interact with on