What do social media have to do with the way research is conducted?

Quite a lot, according to Social Media and Research Workflow, a report from CIBER, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research at University College London. As the report says:

"Researchers are using social media tools to support every phase of the research lifecycle: from identifying research opportunities to disseminating findings at the end. They may not be the same tools, and they are certainly not the same researchers, but social media are most definitely making an impact on scholarly workflow."

Social media are helping to fulfill the demand for cheap, instant communication that the growth of collaborative and interdisciplinary research has created. The most popular tools tend to be mainstream technologies like Skype, Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube. Although awareness of the majority of such tools among researchers is high, there is a gap between awareness and actual use.

And it's an age thing: Researchers under 35 are generally more likely to use at least one social media application than the over-35s ... The report includes many interesting graphs and diagrams.