Archive for February, 2011

Travis’ note: Dave Munger has been a writer and editor for over two decades. He was the coauthor of Cognitive Daily, one of the web’s best-known research psychology blogs. He also co-founded ResearchBlogging.org and ScienceSeeker.org, which collect thousands of science posts from hundreds of blogs in several different languages. He is a columnist for Seedmagazine.com and and 3quarksdaily.com. Here are his thoughts on what to do, and what not to do, when writing a blog post about science.

Scientists and science journalists have all sorts of reasons for writing about science. They may want to share their latest discovery with the world, run a hypothesis by a critical audience, increase their personal profile, or show that they’re cut out for bigger things, like the gossip column.

What I’m going to talk about here is specifically how to write a good research blog post; the kind that might get picked as an Editor’s Selection on ResearchBlogging.org. We typically look for posts that will be interesting to a wider audience than just experts in a field. So it’s important to be clear and engaging, and to give your readers a little help understanding a study that’s probably out of field for them. This post borrows quite heavily from a post I wrote on Cognitive Daily four years ago, so you might want to check that post out too; there are some great tips in the comments section.

1. Find interesting research
This may seem like an obvious step, but there are a couple of problems with the way scientific research is often reported today. First of all, interesting doesn’t necessarily mean new. The major science journals like to make a big splash when their latest issue comes out. After all, the more people hear of them, the more likely they are to subscribe (or ask their library to subscribe). But the general public doesn’t spend every day poring over press releases to find the most up-to-the-second research. What’s interesting to the public is research that’s relevant to their lives — or research that’s just too cool to ignore. This might be a study that was done months or even years ago. If they haven’t heard of it, it’s news to them. The most popular article ever on Cognitive Daily reported on research that was two years old.

2. Make sure you understand it!
Take the time to read the study carefully. If you don’t understand some bit of methods or analysis, find out about it, preferably going beyond just a wikipedia search. This will obviously be easier if you’re in-field, but I often find that writers take some aspects of the research they’re writing about for granted. Question everything! I kept several psychology textbooks handy when I wrote for Cognitive Daily, and I try to verify everything I write on SEED as well with a non-wikipedia source.

I like to underline or highlight key sections of the document I’m writing about, but in general I avoid referring to it as I’m writing, except to verify facts and figures. In this way I’m sure I’m putting everything in my own words.

I also like to put the study aside for at least 30 minutes before writing it up. This helps me clarify my thoughts and come up with a fresh perspective on the material, because the next step requires a writer to approach the article in a new way.

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