I don’t know about you, but to me, preferring to discuss your research in 140 characters or less seems to say a lot about how important and well-thought-out that research is.

Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed reports:

Study: Scholars are present on professional networks, but engage on Twitter

Academia.edu, ResearchGate and other websites jostle for the title of go-to social network for researchers, but when faculty members go online to discuss their peers’ work, many of them turn to Twitter.

That’s one takeaway from Richard Van Noorden’s study of social media use in higher education, published last week in the science journal Nature. Van Noorden, senior reporter for the journal, surveyed 3,509 scholars worldwide this summer about their online habits, and his results suggest many researchers only use the social networks designed specifically for academics to establish a presence, and not much else.

Nearly half, or 1,589, of Van Noorden’s survey respondents named ResearchGate their most frequented social network, but when asked specifically about their use, two-thirds of the scholars said they registered “in case someone wishes to contact me about my research.” Scholars who regularly visited Academia.edu and LinkedIn reported similar habits.

Survey respondents could pick as many of the 16 answer choices as they wanted (or write in their own), and their answers reveal many of the other reasons why scholars signed up for the sites: ResearchGate to locate peers, Academia.edu to post work and LinkedIn to search for jobs. But in all three cases — and for the research paper management software Mendeley — fewer than 10 percent of respondents said they use the networks for “actively discussing my research.”

Although only about one-fifth of its users said they use the site for research discussions, Twitter outscored the other social and professional networks. The microblogging site also beat out the competition among the proportions of users who comment on research, follow discussions, post their own work and share links to their peers’ research.

For some of the most avid social network users, a site designed specifically with researchers in mind can even be counterproductive.