Graduate Institute of Mind, Brain and Consciousness, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Brain and Consciousness Research Centre, TMU-Shuang Ho Hospital, New Taipei City, Taiwan.
PeerJ. 2023 May 8;11:e15270. doi: 10.7717/peerj.15270. eCollection 2023.
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.
科学会议越来越多地包含在线内容。一些会议完全转为线上形式，而另一些会议则采用混合模式，既有现场元素，也有虚拟元素。这种让人们有机会虚拟参加会议的机会，有可能减少其对环境的影响，并使更多人能够公平地参与会议。然而，虚拟会议参与存在的一个问题是，参会者之间的非正式交流减少了。这是一个重要的缺陷，因为非正式联系在知识传播和专业网络发展中都起着重要作用。在会议期间，Twitter 是一个可以进行一些非正式交流的论坛，一些会议也鼓励人们在该平台上参与。然而，目前尚不清楚 Twitter 作为会议参会者之间的社区交流工具，在公平参与方面的效果如何。为了研究这个问题，我们研究了 2010 年至 2021 年期间的四个国际会议的 Twitter 使用情况。研究发现，会议标签的参与度随着时间的推移稳步上升，在 2019 年达到顶峰。用户代表了参会者的 9%，主要分布在欧洲和北美，主要使用英语进行交流（97%的推文）。互动网络中的中心节点也主要分布在这些地区。东亚的用户比该地区神经科学出版物数量所预期的要少。东亚的用户参与度低于其他地区的用户。研究发现，整个互动网络呈现出一种富者俱乐部结构，即连接较多的用户往往与其他具有相似连接数的用户进行更多的互动。最后，研究发现，欧洲和北美的用户往往与本地区的其他用户进行交流，而世界其他地区的用户则将交流指向本地区之外。这些结果表明，尽管会议相关的 Twitter 使用在某种程度上成功地开放了访问权限，但它在使用方面存在一些明显的限制，这些限制可能反映了现场会议固有的不平等方面。如何围绕虚拟会议建立公平的非正式交流网络仍然是一个具有挑战性的问题，需要进一步讨论。
