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Guest Post
To Blog Or Not To Blog?
May 4th
Dear Professor, To blog or not to blog? This is not a question that you should worry about…for now. You compete successfully in three peer review arenas: publishing, grant seeking and tenure & promotion (T&P). These three are interdependent with success in one begetting success in another. The three are built on the same assumption: that your peers are in the best position to critique and thus make awards of publications, of grants and of tenure. This isn’t going to change dramatically in the near future, so please don’t fret over all this blogging stuff. Your klout score is not about to sway your T&P committee.
But note that in Canada, at least, times they are a changin’ (♫)
Canadian research funding is dominated by three federal granting councils (SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC) all of whom are rolling out new funding programs with non-academics on the peer review committees. As I mentioned in a previous blog some (admittedly only a few) peer reviewed journals are including non academics on their editorial boards. Campus-community collaborations are increasingly recognized by T&P committees (especially when the university based scholar and his/her community partner receives a $1M Community University Research Alliance) and there is even a national alliance to examine academic reward and incentive structures for community engaged scholarship.
But you don’t have to worry about that…for now.
Just know that blogs get way more traffic than your peer reviewed paper ever will. More >
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.
Social Media Can Improve Healthcare, But Are Doctors Holding Us Back?
Mar 7th
Travis’ Note: Today’s Guest Post is from Houston Neal from Software Advice. The original article was posted here. Thanks to Michael Koploy for bringing this post to our attention, and to Software Advice for allowing us to share this content here at Science of Blogging.
“Tremendous.” A surprising word to come up in discussion about healthcare. But this is the word I heard several times in recent conversation on social media and medicine.
“Doctors have a tremendous opportunity to help patients online,” said Dr. Kevin Pho, better known as @kevinmd.
“If you look at [social media in] healthcare, the benefits to everyone are tremendous,” agrees Howard Luks, orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC.
Putting these together, we might say, “social media has a tremendous opportunity to improve healthcare.”
But doctors have been slow to adopt social media. Why? Why aren’t they using social media to talk with other professionals, connect with patients and share information with the public?
The time commitment, concerns of liability, and naiveté are cited as major causes. But I think these miss the bigger picture. Social media is about more than the relationships between individuals. It’s about the dissemination of information. Information that can improve health care and save lives.
An Extension of the Exam Room
More and more Americans are going online to look for health information. Estimates are as high as 81%. While some argue this makes doctors less relevant, I think otherwise.
Social media allows doctors to extend their influence beyond the exam room. It allows them to share valuable information with patients, the public, and each other.
“Information is the new third party in the exam room,” says Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. “We can influence information that our patients are reading. Doctors need to be part of the conversation to have a positive impact.”
Social media allows us to share information at a speed and distance that was once impossible. It presents a new opportunity to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases. In some cases, even save lives. But we still need more engagement from healthcare professionals. Doctors have an opportunity – and an obligation – to join us in sharing information online.
How to write a good research blog post
Feb 24th
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.
If you don’t have a blog you don’t have a resume
Feb 8th
Editor’s Note: I have previously come across some of John Dupuis’ wonderful posts on the benefits of blogging in academia and beyond on his ScienceBlogs blog, Confessions of a Science Librarian. After meeting John in person at Science Online 2011 last month, we had a great chat and decided that we’d share some of John’s thoughts on Science of Blogging. Here’s John’s eloquent thoughts on the topic.
I was just going to call this post “On Blogging” but I decided I like Robert Scoble’s rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don’t, but I think it’s an interesting way to frame this collection of links I’ve gathered over the last little while.
The point here is to make the case that blogging is good for your career. It’s been good for me and it’s been good for a lot of other people and I think it has potential for everyone.
Now, is everyone a blogger-in-waiting? Of course not. Would absolutely everyone actually benefit from blogging? Probably not. And if absolutely everyone did take up blogging, would the massive amount of noise generated actually cancel itself out and end up hardly benefiting anyone at all?
Probably.
That being said, let’s take a look at what’s been making me think about blogging lately. More >
How readable is your blog? A quantitative assessment of science blog accessibility
Dec 20th
Editor’s Note: Over the weekend Colin Schultz started a great discussion on his blog about the reading level of science blogs. He has graciously offered to share his thoughts on Science of Blogging. Also, just in case you were wondering, you can also check the readability of your blog by heading over to Google and typing in “site:YourBlog.com” and clicking on the Advanced Search link, right below the regular “Search” button. From the options under the heading “Reading Level”, select “annotate results with reading level” and presto! You have yourself an assessment of the reading level of your particular blog. And now here’s Colin.
What grade are you in?
If you’re an adult, that’s probably not a question you’ve had to think about in a while. According to the pieces of paper on my wall, I’m in 17th grade. If you have a PhD, you’re a bit higher. If you never had an opportunity at post-secondary education, then you’re in 12th grade, or lower still if you didn’t complete highschool. Your level of education isn’t a perfect measure of your reading ability, but it is a decent estimate.
[Ed: This is frightening, but I (Peter) have technically completed a total of 23 grades: high-school until grade 13 (old Ontario system), plus 4 undergrad, 2 MSc and 4 PhD.]
Now, let’s say that two weeks ago you got wrapped up in the excitement about the discovery of a bacteria that can supposedly use arsenic in its DNA. It was intriguing, everyone seemed to be really excited about it, and you wanted to know more.
So, where could you turn?
If you sometimes go by Dr., you probably had a decent chance at working your way through the original study. If you are early in your university career, Ed Yong had you covered. If you are still in highschool, and you wanted to know what other scientists thought of the research, then Carl Zimmer had a story just for you.
These suggestions aren’t based on the level of technical depth or the amount of detail in the science, but are instead based on the different stories’ estimated reading levels. One of the most common assessments of reading level (and the one that comes bundled with Microsoft Word) is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. Using the number of syllables, words and sentences in a piece of writing, the test spits out the school grade for which the writing is best suited.
Newspapers, which try to make their writing as accessible as possible, often try to keep their reading level at or below that expected of a high-schooler. Improving readability makes it easier for people to understand the point, and will probably improve the odds of keeping the reader around all the way to the end of an article. Much like writing that over-uses jargon, if readers have to work to get through a piece of writing, they will probably just tune out.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how they do it (and it may not be perfect*), but Google has started letting you filter your searches by readability. The results aren’t as detailed as the Flesch-Kincaid test. Rather, a site’s content is split into three buckets: basic, intermediate, or advanced. More >
To be or not to be a pseudonymous blogger
Dec 13th
Editor’s Note: As a follow up to Scicurious’ excellent post on how to start a science blog, today Sci discusses the pros and cons of authoring a blog under a pseudonym. As one of the most recognizable pseudonymous science bloggers, Sci knows a thing or two about the topic. And take it from me - Sci takes her pseudonymity very seriously. When we met at a conference last year, she continued to go by Scicurious. To this day, I have not the slightest clue what her real name might be. I certainly would have slipped up by now.
Sci has a pseudonym, and while it’s fine sometimes with other bloggers, many real life people discount me because they think I am “anonymous” and cannot be serious. Keep in mind that pseudonymity and anonymity are different things. While anyone can be “anonymous” and their voices will change all the time, a pseudonym is a fake name that is constant through time as one or more specific people with specific voices. This means that you can, over time and with quality work, build up the trust of people who read you, and develop a reputation online as your pseudonym.
There are often good reasons for being a pseud. Many people assume that those writing under a pseudonym must be cowards, trolls, or otherwise untrustworthy. While this is true for some pseuds, not all pseudonyms are equal, and with time you can recognize those who work to build up reputations under their pseudonym. The reality is that there are lots of good reasons to be pseudonymous, from worries about people not taking you seriously, to professional considerations. Sci is a pseud because I don’t want animal rights activists coming after the real life work I do, not to mention the work of my colleagues, just because I’m supportive of carefully performed animal research (yes, I’ve gotten death threats, and I’m by no means the only one). More >
Science Bloggers: Diversifying the news
Dec 8th
Editor’s Note: When we said we wanted Science of Blogging to pick the brains of the best and brightest in the online science world, we weren’t kidding! Today, I’m excited to share a wonderful post by fellow Canadian, Colin Shultz. Colin is a science journalist, who regularly discusses fascinating topics on his blog and is uber-active on Twitter. In fact, Twitter, is how Colin and I connected. Today, Colin discusses the notion that science blogs may be a key supplement to traditional media in reporting science to the public.
So you know that old, sorry debate about science journalism versus science blogging? The one where the mainstream media are the legitimate suppliers of news about the world, and bloggers are resigned to being snarky commentators?
Or how about the one where blogging creates an echo chamber, where the diversity of sources withers, leaving people in a pool of ideology-reinforcing consistency.
Well have I got some news for you!
These arguments may not only be patently illogical, but rather, the opposite might be true.
In a recent study in the journal Journalism Studies, Gina Walejko and Thomas Ksiazek, both PhD students at Northwestern University, compared the sources that traditional journalists, political bloggers, and science bloggers each turn to when producing their posts. More >
8 Tips on Starting a Science Blog
Dec 6th
Editor’s Note: We could not be more delighted to have Scicurious, one of the top science bloggers out there, share her plentiful wisdom on how to start a science blog. Scicurious is a fellow ex-ScienceBlogs blogger, and now runs a fascinating blog called Neurotic Physiology over at the Scientopia network. All of Sci’s posts are brilliant and engaging, and her “Friday Weird Science” series can not be missed. Here’s Scicurious!
So You Want to Start a Science Blog?
Good for you! No doubt you are looking forward to huge amounts of flattery and fame, millions of hits, and a whole line of merchandise with your face plastered all over it.
Well, maybe those goals are a bit lofty.
Nonetheless, Science Blogging is important. It’s a great way to increase communication between scientists and the public. It’s a good way to do outreach and get more people interested in science. It’s an excellent way to learn to analyze papers and get feedback on your analysis in a public forum. And it’s a really good way to improve your writing skills!
But of course, everyone wants to know where to start. In my case, I pretty much just started a blog, and learned as I went. School of hard knocks and all that. But there’s no reason that you should have to do the same, and starting a blog doesn’t have to be uphill through the snow both ways.
Over the years, I have collected some tips on blogging and things to think about as you get started. And Peter has been kind enough to let me share them with you! More >
