Apart from reading scientific publications from official journal websites, researchers from China, particularly younger researchers, have relied increasingly heavily on another avenue to keep them informed about the literature — through social-media mobile apps, with WeChat as the best-known example.
Fig. 1 The logo of WeChat.
WeChat is a Chinese messaging, social media, and mobile payment app. Since its release in 2011, WeChat has become one of the world's most-used mobile apps, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Nearly every mobile user in China has a WeChat account. Some of my US friends have also installed WeChat in addition to WhatsApp for instant messaging.
WeChat allows users to establish public platforms to broadcast user-generated content to subscribers. These public platforms are similar to LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram accounts created by companies or research groups, which can post advertisements for promotion purposes. WeChat platform owners and associated management team members are responsible for creating, editing, and publishing the posts. Subscribers receive notifications containing links to the new items. They can tap the link to read and post comments to exchange ideas. Around 2015, some public accounts began to select recently published research papers for reporting. Typically, their reports were written in Chinese and summarize the main ideas and critical findings, similar to daily news feeds or journal e-alerts sent to your emails.
Entering 2016, public platforms reporting scientific publications (coined academic public platforms hereafter) sprung up. Besides the soaring number, academic public platforms became increasingly specialized, covering one or more research fields, including sustainable energy, materials sciences, chemistry, physics, biology, geography, and social sciences. Their information is kept updated because they only select papers hot off the press for highlighting. Recently, popular science articles, conference announcements, and researcher recruitments have emerged.
The number of posted articles varies between one and eight per day, and each piece has about 500 to 2000 Chinese characters (approximately 1- to 20-min reading). Fig. 2 is a screenshot of six posts by a polymer-science platform on July 6th, 2020. Typically, a post usually begins with a short introduction of the background, followed by the article information, including the authors and their affiliations, the title, the journal name, and one-sentence summary of the most prominent significance (Fig. 3A). The main body consists of key figures in the paper and their corresponding articulations (Fig. 3B). Different composers have their unique writing styles or formats (e.g., drawing cartoons), but need to write in Chinese.
Fig. 2. A screenshot of six posts by a polymer-science WeChat public platform on July 6th, 2020.
Fig. 3 (A) The beginning and (B) main body of a post introducing a recent publication on carp scale in Matters.
Nowadays, academic public platforms intimately integrate graduate students, postdocs, professors, industrial developers, engineers, and journal editors. Graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors can report for the platforms. Some of them serve as voluntary or salary-based editors for polishing, proofreading, and typesetting the posts. Some writers also participate in platform maintenance by checking readers' comments and deleting controversial or misleading information. Researchers, particularly some graduate students, postdocs, and young professors, prefer to consult the core information distilled in their native language on WeChat rather than reading original articles. Besides platform-generated items, research groups sometimes recommend their just-accepted papers in high-profile journals or directly submit their posts to one platform for dissemination and promotion. It seems that WeChat platforms are virtual journals collecting brief Chinese-version of published manuscripts in English.
Editors of academic journals have also created their platforms to publicize potentially high-impact papers published in their journals. Additionally, journal editors can create group chats to gather readers of similar research expertise and share the posts within the targeted audience (Fig. 4). The authors of the reported articles can participate in discussion with the group members to answer inquiries or solicit future collaborations. These activities benefit journals, authors, and readers.
Fig. 4. A group chat created by Sci. China Chem. Editors of this journal post highlights, along with brief descriptions of the potentially impactful papers published in their journal. In this screenshot, there are 500 group members in the chat.
Companies and research institutions financially support most academic public platforms. In return, platforms advertise their products or services in their posts. The advertisements are either banners, mentioned explicitly in the text, or written into a post. Funders consider the number of subscribers a vital factor to determine which platform to support. Since WeChat users have unlimited freedom to subscribe or unsubscribe from a platform at any time, platform owners must continually offer high-quality and eye-catching content to attract and retain their readers. Successful platforms can have more than 100k subscribers, and their most popular posts can reach over 10k reading times in a day. This attention economics unconsciously cultivate writers and editors who can quickly grasp the main ideas of research articles and present the core values in a compelling yet understandable way. Writers can sometimes get their remuneration of contributions once the post is out, and the amount depends on the number of clicks on the post. Therefore, WeChat writer can become a part-time job.
With the rapid rise of short-video apps such as TikTok, I envision that the future of delivering state-of-the-art research will transit from texted posts to informative videos. WeChat has already enabled creating and sharing videos within the app, and I am eager to witness the revolution of information delivery in the foreseeable future.
Tianyu Liu
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