Twitter increases scientific networks

Twitter provides access to a 'virtual' department of followers that almost always exceeds the size of traditional academic departments. (A) The number of full-time faculty members in each scientist’s institution vs the number of twitter followers for 116 marine scientists; note that the number of twitter followers is on a log scale. The red line shows the one-to-one slope. (B) The average number of twitter followers was 730 times larger than the average number of full-time faculty members in each scientist’s department. Boxplots indicate medians (thick horizontal lines), first and third quartiles (boxes), 95% confidence intervals (whiskers) and outliers (points).