Universities' value judgements about research are becoming 'coupled' to social media platforms as they compete for funding by demonstrating their influence beyond academia, an analysis suggests.
he study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge, focused on how universities use social media in 'impact' case studies, which are a requirement of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF is a periodic assessment of university research, run by UK higher education funding bodies; the current review ends next year.
Researchers examined 1,675 submissions from the previous exercise in 2014. They found that universities consistently use platform metrics—such as follower numbers, likes and shares—to claim that their research is making an impression.
The authors describe this as a 'naïve and problematic' grasp of what both the data and 'impact' actually mean. But they suggest that in a competitive funding environment in which that meaning is in any case unclear, universities are reaching for social media metrics as easy to access measures of success that they hope might attract funding.
That process links the opaque, algorithm driven value systems of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to universities 'evaluative infrastructures'. The study adds that this is just one example of how digital platforms are changing higher education, often unnoticed—and with uncertain consequences.
The study was undertaken by Dr. Mark Carrigan and Dr. Katy Jordan, at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge; Dr. Carrigan has since become a lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education.
"Social media platforms seem to be acquiring a role in how numbers manage higher education, as a sort of proxy for impact capacity," Carrigan said. "We are starting to see academics seeking more followers and more shares not to support their research, but because it might be good for their careers."
"Those metrics, however, result from social media companies manipulating content and user behaviour to maximise engagement with their platforms—a priority which then starts to become loosely coupled to universities' own evaluative judgements about research." ■