Scientists should blog?

You are happy because the first paper of your PhD has been accepted!
Even better, in a highly ranked journal! Congrats! After all, you have invested so much on this study, it's like giving birth to a baby. It was difficult but now you are proud of yourself.

What happened next? well, not that much...Maybe your paper will be cited, maybe several times.

It's a bit frustrating right? You would have liked to have more acknowledgments, not only by your colleagues at work, but by the scientific community. But how?

Scientists should blog?

I think it's a good solution!

I was myself frustrated by this issue. But not only by that, by a general lack of an organized scientific community, through which we are really able to communicate our work. So I decided to blog my research and to share my experiences (and to have a little bit of fun!).

While I started blogging, I realized I was not the only one who wished to share their research! The question about blogging our research is not a new one. However, it's still an important topic.

Here is an example:

When Peter Janiszewshi was still a PhD student he explained his own experience in the site Science of Blogging. After two years of PhD, Peter had a respectable number of papers. However, he felt frustrated because any of his work "was making an impact beyond the traditional boundaries of academia: peer-review publications and scientific conferences". So he, and one of his colleagues, decided to create a blog to speak about their research. "Our first post may have been read by a total of 6 people – assuming our girlfriends (now fiancées) and both sets of parents read the link we sent via email". However, 2 years and a lot of work later, their blog has been hosted by the freshly launched PloS Blogs network. The audience was still not really there. He then decided to post a "5-part series on the topic of metabolically-healthy obesity" with a final discussion of his recently published study. The post attracted the attention of BoingBoing.com, a very popular aggregator of interesting news stories which sent a lot of traffic. "All of this interest resulted in a total of 12,080 page views and over 70 comments from readers during the week of the series." "Put another way, the same research which I published in a prestigious medical journal and made basically no impact, was then viewed by over 12,000 sets of eyes because I decided to discuss it online."
Maybe these numbers can appear low, but this is science! not the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton!

I will try myself to present a paper, we will see how it works for me! However, I am not hosted by PloS...

Speaking about PloS Blogs network. PloS, and other journals (Science, Nature) are doing a good job making science more accessible to the public with the creation of Blogs. I really like the idea and I try to follow new posts on subjects I am interested in. The good thing with these blogs is that it generates a large audience of great scientific quality (and at least comments left at the end of a post are not in "text language" lol!).
It's interesting to note that Journals like Current Biology, Ecology Letters or New Phytologists do not have blog. Is it because the panel of topics they cover is too specific to attract a large audience? This might be the reason. So what about the discovery you want to share? Will it attract a broad audience? To be able to post a blog in PloS Blogs, for example, you need to have a blog, that means you need to post often. This is maybe what you want. What about scientists who want to share, just one time, their recent discovery? (well, if you obtain interesting results regularly then you should propose to Blog in a prestigious journal!). If you "only" want to discuss about your findings, have feedbacks etc., in my knowledge, there is no open (because you want to be read), large (you want to be read by a "large" number of people to potentially have feedback!) and well organized hosting entity doing so.

We should have discussion group about science, not affiliated to Journals like Science or PloS. Of course, I am not against these journals, as I said before. Ideally, a discussion group or a blog more neutral (less formal?) and accessible to the majority of scientists (without having 3 Nature and 2 Science papers) would be better. The blog could be organized in categories, like 1/Science and Plants, 2/Immunology, 3/Astrobiology, etc. People specialized in one category could blog in their own research categories, and, at the same time, follow and comment on the different research categories of the blog.

However, if a blog or group of discussion exists, who will manage that? Who will benefit from hosting and managing such a group besides postdocs and PhD students?

Let's imagine that the scheme proposed above is a good solution and a lot of scientists start to blog or publish in scientific groups. Problems can arise related to the validity of data or the accuracy of design experiments. Should we have blog reviewers? Maybe a sort of rating of studies by researchers reading blogs and blogging themselves, weighted by the level of expertise of the researchers...maybe... I am not myself convinced that is necessary.
Actually this issue is more related to this question: What data should we blog? Published or new data?
This will be the topic of a next post!

---

You might like:

"Bad Advice, Not Young Scientists,  Should Hit the Road" Mark S. Cohen

Friend or foe?

To view all the posts of the category "Life of a scientist" click here

---

You find the post interesting, funny or useful? Leave a comment!