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Archive for April, 2011
Get to Know a ScienceBlogger: Dr Yoni Freedhoff
Apr 28th
Dr Yoni Freedhoff - Weighty Matters
Today we have another interview in our Get To Know A ScienceBlogger Series. Today’s interview is with Dr Yoni Freedhoff, a family physician and founder of Ottawa’s Bariatric Medical Institute (a “multi-disciplinary, ethical, evidence-based nutrition and weight management centre”). His blog Weighty Matters is extremely influential in the area of weight management and policy (especially here in Canada) and has inspired many other obesity researchers and practitioners to enter social media, including Peter and myself. Enjoy the interview!
To learn more about Yoni please check out Weighty Matters or connect with him on Twitter.
What is the general subject of your blog? What is a “typical” post for you, both in terms of length and in terms of the topic.
Exposing what I see as truths behind nutrition, weight management, health policy and advertising. My typical post finds a study, a policy or an advertisement that’s trying to pull a fast one and calls it out. Length wise, I’d guess an average would be 400 words.
What was your primary reason for starting a blog?
I’ve been blogging for a relatively long time. Started out in 2005 and did so because a friend of mine who’s a PR expert told me I should. I think it was his nice way of asking me to shut up. I think he told me something along the lines of , “you seem to have a lot to say, why don’t you start a blog?”.
How often do you post, and roughly how much time goes into each post?
I post 6 days a week. Time really varies. I’d say most posts take 10 minutes. The more detailed posts can take hours.
How do you fit in time for the blog?
I’m not sure. I write quickly, so that doesn’t hurt. Sometimes, if I know it’s going to be a very busy few weeks, I’ll tee up the two weeks posts in their entirety before the busy time hits.
Have there been any benefits to blogging, either personally or professionally?
How To Blog a Conference
Apr 26th
Travis’ Note: Today’s guest post is from the epic pseudonymous blogger Scicurious. She is one of the founding members of the Scientopia network of science bloggers, where you can find her extremely interesting and popular blog Neurotic Physiology. She has written previous Science of Blogging guest posts on how to start a science blog, and issues to consider when deciding whether to blog under a pseudonym.
A few weeks ago, Sci had an opportunity to blog the Experimental Biology 2011 Conference (my posts on it are here). I’ll admit, I volunteered, but the organizers were wonderfully welcoming of a young blogger, and very pleased to have me on board. And then Travis and Peter let me know that they were going to blog an upcoming conference, and asked for tips. And TIPS. Boy, do I have TIPS! And they asked me to post them. So below you will find the stuff that I did, along with various tips on how to keep up your energy, and how to make the scientists LOVE your blog. But keep in mind. These tips apply best to scientists who are blogging conferences in their field. To journalists, not so much.
Before and during the conference, I did the following:
1) Went through the abstracts and found stuff I liked. I narrowed it down by cool titles and then looked for abstracts that were good. I made a real effort to get far outside my field, but stick to within your field if that’s what you prefer.
2) Emailed the contact people for each abstract (4 days before the meeting), asking them if they’d like their work at the conference to be blogged. In the initial email I made a point to include my academic position and university, as well as links to my blog. Each email was specific for their abstract, making it clear that I had read their abstract and was interested on a more than cursory level. Technically, this isn’t required, if something is presented at a conference, it’s public, but I know that many scientists don’t really feel that way, and I would much rather make friends than enemies.
3) When they got back to me (and they ALL did, no one said no, but everyone also said they’d scoped me out on my blog and on Google beforehand), I set up a time to meet with the presenter Often the PI was present,especially if the student was younger.
4) I met with each group for 30 minutes. During that time I asked about their work, took copious notes, and also had them run through the presentation. I also took care to ask if there was anything in particular they wanted to emphasize. A couple of times I had to get an interpreter (wonderful presenter from Brazil, she spoke no English, and I no Portuguese. But we got through it! And her science is awesome.).
5) I then went back, sat my butt down, ate many cookies, and wrote it up. Before I posted it I sent it off to the authors of the study for approval, with a stated deadline of 12 hours (I told them during the interview when they would receive the post, and when I would need their edits back). Don’t worry, they’ll get back to you.
6) When the post went live (with their edits, everyone sent at least minor edits), I sent them a link to it with a thank you note. I have since ended up in several school and department newsletters and on some laboratory websites!
Tips for getting PIs and shy scientists to warm to you.
Get To Know A ScienceBlogger: Kevin Zelnio
Apr 20th
Kevin Zelnio - Deep Sea News
Today we have another interview in our Get To Know A ScienceBlogger Series! Today’s interview is with Kevin Zelnio. Kevin is a marine biologist and writer. He has studied the ecology and evolution of animals living around underwater volcanoes and described several new species of anemone and shrimp. Kevin is the assistant editor for Deep Sea News, where he contributes articles on marine science. He is now a freelance writer and independent scientist and consultant living in beautiful coastal North Carolina. Outside of science, Kevin is a songwriter and enjoys spending time with family in the long-leaf Carolina pines!
To learn more about Kevin view his CV, send him an email and follow him twitter!
What is the general subject of your blog? What is a “typical” post for you, both in terms of length and in terms of the topic.
Deep Sea News covers the Earth’s largest environment! I serve as the assistant editor there. While we traditionally covered news, research and basic facts of the deep-sea, we’ve branched out in the last couple years to really encompass the whole ocean. Guess the deep-sea wasn’t big enough for us. We cover everything from conservation issues to new tech, nautical history and collect commentary and posts from our colleagues to add new voices to marine science blogosphere. The latter is the is part of a new initiative of ours called the Scientist in Residence. Each month highlights a new voice who ideally writes a post per week about their research area. We’ve had an algal oceanographer and a theoretical marine ecologist. Next up is another marine ecologist and sea tech! More variety is on the way too. Typical posts do not exist and vary widely from a quote and link to something of interest to long drawn out researched article.
What was your primary reason for starting/joining your blog?
Craig McClain started Deep Sea News in 2004 at blogger to collect news and new research in one place. As founder, Craig serves as chief editors and DSN is his baby. He has nurtured it through thick and thin into a marine science powerhouse. I joined in 2007. I was a graduate student in a deep-sea lab at the time and started regularly commenting on the blog. He invited me to start a guest post column on the blog - From the Desk of Zelnio - which I enjoyed. Inspired, I went off to found The Other 95% after that and made it very successful pretty quickly. About 6 months after that Craig asked me to come onto DSN permanently with him and Peter Etnoyer. I had been blogging for about 8 months then (which is like 8 years in blog years) and had settled into a voice and rhythm that seemed to resonate with people and provided enjoyment for me.
I think in hindsight, I really took to blogging quickly because I have a lot of passion and enthusiasm for science and the work I do. I needed an outlet. I am a naturally outgoing and social person and need to talk about stuff and share new things I find out! For my personality types, blogging is a natural fit. I recognized that this was an effective outreach tool too. Deep Sea News was pretty established, they got in early in the science blogging game and had a built in audience for me so I could reach people immediately and they appreciated getting their science served ‘salty’.
An RCT to determine the value of blogging
Apr 18th
When Science of Blogging first went live one of the first comments we received was from the well-known pseudonymous science blogger Drug Monkey, who said that:
One of the mission critical assignments is to figure out how to show real-world impact of blogging. Traffic numbers are insufficient to convince a traditional audience. How to make the determination of impact easier, consistent and valid?
One of the main reasons that Peter and I started Science of Blogging was because we’ve seen that it has a lot of value for us personally. It’s been a useful way to promote our research and network with others, but DM has a point - simply telling someone that your post got X number of hits doesn’t really convey the benefits of blogging. But I’m not sure that we will ever have an Impact Factor-like metric that will allow people to easily quantify just how effective an individual blog is. We could certainly create one based on some combination of comments, incoming links, and viewers per post (or google rankings, etc), but I’m skeptical that it would ever be used in performance reviews or the like. It would be terrific if it did, but I just don’t see it happening. If people don’t see value in blog traffic stats, I don’t think they’re going to value any other blog-related metric either.
Instead, since we are all researchers anyway, I think it makes sense to do the studies to see whether blogging about a topic can help achieve hard outcomes that are already valued. For example, does blogging about a journal article increase the number of downloads or citations that it receives? Does it increase the likelihood that health-care professionals will perform an evidence-based treatment, or avoid a non-evidence-based treatment? Does it help individuals to adopt healthier behaviours?
These are the things that will convince people that blogging is worth the effort. And since we’re all researchers, it really wouldn’t be that hard to actually start to measure these things.
Here’s an example of an RCT that would be tremendously useful in determining the value of blogging in terms of increasing paper downloads and citations, and would cost absolutely no money to perform. Select 30 papers from a wide range of academic disciplines, all of which are at least 5 years old and have less than 3 citations (e.g. if they aren’t cited much now, it’s unlikely that they ever will be). Randomly select 15 of these articles, and ask for volunteers from among the 1000+ active bloggers on Researchblogging.org who are willing to blog about the papers relevant to their discipline. Then, track the number of downloads and citations for the blogged and non-blogged papers over a period of several years, to see if there is a difference between the two groups.
We could even do something similar using papers in the PLoS journals as a convenience sample - are the PLoS papers that have been discussed in blogs downloaded and cited more often? This could be potentially biased (I’m assuming that the papers that get blogged about are probably more interesting or novel, which would make them more likely to get cited as well), but the data is freely available for anyone with a summer student with time to kill.
I know there are a million and one qualitative studies that could also be done in this area, and I’ve participated in a few myself. But lots of people (myself included) like to see hard numbers, and it really wouldn’t be very hard to get them. Seriously, why isn’t the science blogging community doing this? If I’m just ignorant of the research, please tell me. And if it really doesn’t exist, then why don’t we get it going?
Travis
Get To Know A Science Blogger: Daniel Lende
Apr 14th
Dr Daniel Lende - Neuroanthropology
This post is part of our series profiling individuals who have successfully used social media as a platform for science communication. These individuals cover a broad range of academic disciplines, and we hope that they will be a useful source of info and motivation for others who are considering moving into social media, or for those who are already online but simply looking for some new ideas.
Today we interview with Dr Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology. Daniel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of South Florida. He trained in medical, psychological, and biological anthropology and public health at Emory University. His main research interests are substance use and abuse, the intersection of anthropology and neuroscience, behavioral health, community-based research, and public and applied anthropology. He has done fieldwork in both Colombia and the United States. You can reach him at daniel . lende @ gmail . com, or follow him on twitter at daniel_lende (bio from PLoS Blogs).
What is the general subject of your blog? What is a “typical” post for you, both in terms of length and in terms of the topic.
Neuroanthropology covers the intersection of anthropology and neuroscience, with an additional focus on developments in the sciences of the mind and in important news and controversies within anthropology. We generally write three types of post, shorter post that focus more on “news” and might be 500-750 words, a medium post from 800-2000 words (including our weekly round ups), and a long post, which goes from 2000 words and well on up.
What was your primary reason for starting/joining your blog?
My colleague Greg Downey and I founded Neuroanthropology.net as a way to discuss research and develop ideas based on our interests in neuroscience and anthropology, which proved useful since we were living on separate continents that point after several years of being colleagues in the same department.
How often do you post, and roughly how much time goes into each post?
We post several times a week. A typical post (short or medium) can take from 1-3 hours to craft, sometimes longer depending on the length of the post.
How do you fit in time for blogging and social media?
I often do social media in “down time” - early in the morning, right after lunch, if I need a break from writing or teaching. For blogging, writing is writing - so I generally fit it into my schedule whenever some topic catches my eye and I decide to write a post.
Have there been any benefits to blogging, either personally or professionally?
Get to Know a Scienceblogger: Patrice Brassard
Apr 12th
Dr Patrice Brassard of Le Physiologiste
Do you ever wonder how people get into online science communication? I certainly hope so, because over the coming weeks Peter and I will be introducing a new series interviewing science communicators about their experiences promoting science using social media. These individuals cover a broad range of academic disciplines, and we hope that they will be a useful source of info and motivation for others who are considering moving into social media, or for those who are already online but simply looking for some new ideas. If you would like to share your own experiences communicating science through social media feel free to do so in the comments, or to introduce yourself to us via Twitter or email (saunders [dot] travis [at] gmail [dot] com).
Our first interview comes from Dr Patrice Brassard, an assistant professor of Kinesiology at Université Laval in Quebec city, Canada. His main research interests are the integration of cardiopulmonary and cerebrovascular physiology in patients with diabetes at rest and during exercise, and the impact of mental work on the cardiovascular system in healthy subjects. His blog is titled Le Physiologiste and for the past two weeks he has also been guest-posting at the blog network Scientopia.
1. What is the general subject of your blog?
Initially, the general subject of Le Physiologiste was supposed to be…physiology :-). However, I started by sharing my experiences as a junior faculty member. It is important to mention that when I began to read science blogs, I was very interested in these kinds of posts from bloggers sharing similar research and teaching issues than mine. The other collaborators at Le Physiologiste are graduate students and are sharing their experiences as well (in English and French). A couple of weeks ago, we finally decided to include posts where we are actually discussing physiology, mostly in French.
I would like this blog to become a place for graduate students, researchers and professors in physiology to debate about hot physiology topics.
2. What was your primary reason for starting a blog?
The primary reason for starting my blog was that, to my knowledge, there are no valuable French blogs/websites discussing published literature in integrative/exercise physiology…however, I soon noticed that it would be easier to start blogging in English, because I was already exchanging with bloggers in that language.
I still have that goal of discussing and debating physiology research in French…Our blog remains a work in progress for the moment!
3. How often do you post, and roughly how much time goes into each post?
Knowledge Dissemination: blogging vs peer review
Apr 7th
Travis’ Note: Today’s post is from Dr David J Phipps of ResearchImpact, a Canadian knowledge-exchange network. The original post can be found on Mobilize This!, the ResearchImpact blog. Thanks to David for allowing us to cross-post his article here.
In an age of self publishing – including blogs, videos, and other Web-based media – why do we still seek to publish in traditional academic peer-reviewed journals? Vanity.
ResearchImpact-York published two academic papers in 2009. In 2010 we had one in press, two submitted, and one just rejected for a second time, from the same journal. Since our first post on May 30, 2008, ResearchImpact has published 206 blogs on Mobilize This!, an average of 6 or 7 each month.
Here’s a comparison of blogging and peer-reviewed publishing: More >
Scienceblogging Roundup: March 27-April 2
Apr 2nd
While we post lengthy discussions here on Science of Blogging, there are many research updates, news stories, videos, etc. related to science communication that we come across on a daily basis that never grace the pages of the blog. Most of these mini-stories we share with our followers on Twitter, and we encourage those of you with active Twitter accounts to communicate with us there to get real-time updates of all the stuff we are discussing (Follow Peter and/or Follow Travis). For those of you who shy away from Twitter, enjoy below the best mini-stories that we came across during the prior week along with links to the original source so that you can follow the full story.
- Personal tweets make profs seem more credible (Ars Technica)
- Terrific advice for grad students and PhDs considering alternative careers (LabSpaces)
- Cut the crap and write better now (CopyBlogger)
- The popular blog Neuroskeptic has been featured in an editorial in Annals of Neurology - check out what they had to say! (Neuroskeptic)
- A possible upside to cyberbullying - at least in comparison to regular bullying (The Atlantic)
- Uber-blogger PZ Myers announces he is leaving ScienceBlogs… April Fools.
Have a great weekend!
Travis
