What is the Role of Social Media in Scholarly Publishing?

It seems as though the role, value, and impact of social media in scholarly communications is a continuous debate. Do researchers use social media? Does social media boost citations? Are citations really all that matter? Does social media impact the reputation of publishers, authors, or the particular discipline of study? Are some disciplines more likely than others to derive value from social media? The list of questions and the opinions and data supporting them vary greatly.

Recently Outsell wrote an Insight in which they discussed Kudos’ recent author promotion research.