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Exploring the performance of Biological Invasions in social media five years after opening its Facebook and Twitter accounts

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Abstract

Social media can help scientific journals to disseminate and increase the social and scientific reach and impact of their publications. With this goal, the journal Biological Invasions has been active on Facebook and Twitter since 2017. Here, we assess for the first time the performance of Biological Invasions’ Facebook and Twitter accounts. Twitter is the most widely used channel by scientists. Accordingly, scientists were the main followers of Biological Invasions’ Twitter account. The number and geographical diversity of followers and the number of times Biological Invasions was mentioned in social networks were much higher on Twitter than on Facebook. However, Biological Invasions’ Facebook account reaches users from different geographical areas than its Twitter account does (i.e., most followers of Biological Invasions’ Facebook account were located in Europe and South America, while most followers on Twitter were located in Europe and North America). Certain geographical areas (e.g., Africa, Asia, and Central America) were poorly represented among social media followers on both accounts. Social media activities did not affect the number of reads or citations of Biological Invasions’ scientific publications. However, being active on social media is likely to increase the social and scientific impact of the journal and to improve diversity and inclusivity of its scientific publications. We hope that future efforts directed towards increasing the performance of Biological Invasions in social media will help us achieve these goals.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Qiang Yang for helping us translate the abstract into Chinese. AN and SC acknowledge funding from EXPRO grant no. 19-28807X (Czech Science Foundation) and long-term research development project RVO 67985939 (Czech Academy of Sciences). We also thank the handling editor and the two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped to improve this manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by EXPRO grant no. 19-28807X (Czech Science Foundation) and long-term research development project RVO 67985939 (Czech Academy of Sciences).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Invasion Ecology, Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences, CZ-25243, Průhonice, Czech Republic

    Ana Novoa & Susan Canavan

  2. Agronomy Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Deah Lieurance

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Daniel Simberloff

  4. Natural Resources Science, University of Rhode Island, 9 East Alumni Avenue, Woodward Hall 133, Kingston, RI, 02881, USA

    Laura A. Meyerson

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  1. Ana Novoa
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  2. Susan Canavan
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  3. Deah Lieurance
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  4. Daniel Simberloff
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  5. Laura A. Meyerson
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Correspondence to Ana Novoa.

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Novoa, A., Canavan, S., Lieurance, D. et al. Exploring the performance of Biological Invasions in social media five years after opening its Facebook and Twitter accounts. Biol Invasions 25, 141–152 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-022-02901-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-022-02901-8

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