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Social Media for Scientists: A lecture
Oct 12th
Travis and I recently gave a keynote presentation at our alma mater, Queen’s university, on the utility of social media use among academics, researchers, and graduate students.
The 1 hr presentation, entitled “How to win friends and influence people with social media” covers the following topics:
1. Why researchers and graduate students use social media
2. The (many) pros and (few) cons of being an academic online
3. How to build a basic strategy for taking your research online
Enjoy the video and please share with any colleagues who might be interested. Feel free to skip to 4:20 for the start of the talk. Looking forward to your comments!
Peter
Crowdfunding Questions With Petridish.org Co-founder Matt Salzberg
Jul 9th
A few weeks ago I was approached by the folks at Petridish.org, asking if I’d be interested in doing a post on their science crowdfunding site. I’m fascinated by crowdfunding and think that it has a huge amount of potential, both as a means of funding science, and as a means of incentivizing science communication - in a world where the public funds your research directly, you have much more incentive to communicate with them about your work. Since I didn’t know much about Petridish.org at the time, I asked if one of their founders would be interested in doing an interview with me instead. Below is that interview, with Petridish.org co-founder Matt Salzberg. More on Matt can be found at the bottom of this post.
I have yet to try crowdfunding myself, but if you have any experience with Petridish or any other crowdfunding platform (or thoughts on which platform(s) will eventually succeed and pull away from the rest of the pack) I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
1. Simple question: what is crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding reflects the power of the internet to pool the collective actions of many small participants to make a larger project happen. In the case of Petridish.org, we help scientists and researchers raise funding for their projects from people who are passionate about their work.
2. Could you describe what Petridish.org is, and how it works?
Petridish.org is the largest crowdfunding website devoted entirely to science and research funding. Researchers post materials about a project they want to launch, and contributors on our site can donate to those projects in exchange for rewards and other tokens of appreciation.
Typically, researchers set a goal and a deadline by which they hope to raise the money. If they reach the goal by the deadline, then the project is successfully funded. If they don’t reach the goal, no money changes hands.
3. What gave you the idea for starting Petridish.org?
Before starting Petridish.org, I worked at a large venture capital firm and became interested in the power of the internet to transform the way things were funded. One website, kickstarter had become very successful in raising money for art and creative projects. I wanted to bring that power to science funding, which is an interest area of mine and is an area that desperately needs new models for funding.
4. Can you give a rough idea of the % of projects that have been funded so far, and how much funding has been received by researchers (either the average amount or the total across all projects)?
We’ve done significantly in excess of $100,000 of transaction volume since launching earlier this year. 80% of all of our projects have been successfully funded.
5. There have been a number of crowdfunding science websites in the past few years (Microryza, SciFlies.org, Science Donors, MyProjects, Open Genius, #SciFund Challenge, etc), many of which seem to have trouble taking off. What makes Petridish.org different and/or more likely to succeed?
There are a few things that make us different. First, we’ve focused on building a high quality, fun web experience for contributors. Aside from our focus on design, we hand select only the most interesting and impactful projects to feature on our site, including those with great videos, pictures and rewards. Many of the existing sites focus exclusively on the experience for the scientist raising money- we cater to both sides of the marketplace.
Second, we only do “all or nothing” funding. We do this because it protects the scientist from having to do a project without sufficient funding and it protects contributors who wouldn’t want to donate to a project that doesn’t have enough funding to go through. It also encourages people to really pull together to promote a project, since a project won’t happen without enlisting the support of others as well.
6. The crowdfunding science initiative that I’ve been most impressed with is the #SciFund Challenge, since they’ve partnered with Rockethub to bring their projects to a wider audience, and also done a lot of work to promote science communication. How are you bringing people to Petridish.org to see the projects that are listed there?
We do extensive web marketing activities to help the projects get funded. We have presences on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, which helps drive people to our projects. We also have a weekly newsletter that sends the projects to thousands of our supporters. And we’re building relationships with larger media companies for regular press coverage. The all or nothing mechanism also really incentivizes people to share the projects and enlist their friends to help the project get funded.
Blogging and self-promotion revisited
Jun 12th
A few weeks ago there were a number of interesting posts floating around the web discussing the appropriateness of science blogging as a form of self-promotion (see this post by Scicurious for an excellent backgrounder) . This is an issue that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about - communicating with people about our own research wasn’t the only reason that Peter and I got into blogging, but it was a very big part of it. And it’s one of the main reasons why I advocate for researchers to get involved in social media.
Out of curiosity I put up a poll asking people whether they felt it was ok for a person to blog about their own research, and today I thought I would share those results (sorry for the longer than expected delay getting them posted).
The survey asked “Is it ok to blog about your own research?”
The available options were:
1. Yes
2. Yes, but only if done using your real name
3. No
We had 34 responses which makes this an <sarcasm> extremely representative sample </sarcasm>. What’s more, I have no idea of the background of those who responded, although they are likely people who follow either myself, Scicurious or Mr Epidemiology on twitter. Here is how those responses broke down.
11 people (32.4% of respondents) stated unequivocally that yes, it is ok to blog about your own research. I presume that these people don’t care whether you identify yourself as the study’s author in the post (something which would be impossible should you choose to use a pseudonym). All 23 other respondents (67.6% of those who completed the survey) said that it is ok to blog about your own work, but only if you use your real name. This is how I voted personally since I think this would prevent people from smearing their competition without disclosing their own conflict of interest, which is a concern that has been voiced by Drug Monkey. Given that comment (and other similar comments that I’ve heard in the past), I was surprised that not a single person said that it was completely inappropriate to blog about your own work under any circumstances (it might be worth noting that the vote breakdown does seem to be in general agreement with the bulk of the comments on Sci’s original post).
Finally, a small minority of respondents added a few additional comments after the survey. Here are a few:
If using a pseudonym you need to create the links; otherwise you are being a bit dishonest. Don’t like all this talk of ‘trashing your competitors’ though - that smacks of your field not doing actual science but just competing for funding…
I have a few rules I impose on myself: I only blog about specifics after the paper’s published. I don’t do anything that I think might hint of “prior publication.”
[the above pretty much perfectly describes the approach that Peter and I have taken at Obesity Panacea… I can’t imagine that our current or previous supervisors would have been so indulgent with our blogging if we were scooping our own publications!]
I’ve never seen a difference between a blog post explaining your paper and a conference presentation, other than the content of your presentation will likely be ephemeral and not recorded and available indefinitely. If you’re research paints a contrasting picture to that of a colleague, as long as your data is available for comparison (i.e. published), then it shouldn’t where you discuss it.
Is there anyone out there who thinks it is inappropriate to blog about your own research under any circumstances? Let me know why in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who took part in the survey!
Travis
Blogging and self-promotion
May 10th
Our friend Scicurious has an excellent post today on Scientopia discussing blogging as a form of scientific communication. Specifically, she asks whether it is appropriate to blog about your own research. Scicurious does not blog about her own work, but many people do. Peter and I explicitly started our blog Obesity Panacea to communicate our own research, and other work in our field of study.
Sci’s post stems from a recent session at Experimental Biology on Science Communication (full details of the event available here), and focuses specifically on the issue of self-promotion among academics. Quite frankly, it wasn’t viewed very positively by some of the presenters at the session. From her post, here is her description of their views (my emphasis added):
…academics have two different kinds of self-promotion. One is ok, and one is not. One takes place in the ivory tower, and one involves the dreaded public.
Academic self-promotion is good. Knowing and meeting the right people, staying in touch and making sure they remember who you are. Academic self-promotion is in fact more than good, it’s essential. The sad reality of biomedical science as I know it is that no one will fund your work if they don’t have a clue who you are. By “you”, I don’t mean you personally (though that certainly helps), but who you have trained with, who THAT person trained with, who’s in your department, and what you all have done. Grant people like to call this “evidence of past productivity”, and “training environment”, but what it really means is whether or not you’ve published, and who do you work with that they’ve heard of. There’s a reason we refer to papers as “Smith et al, 2011″, and not by their titles, because by referring to that person we are referring to their body of work, their history, and their expertise.
This means you have to do a lot of self-promotion within academia. We call this “networking”, “presenting at conferences”, “chatting up the seminar speaker at lunch”, and in extreme cases “brown nosing”. This is the “good” kind of self-promotion, the kind that we get a lot of lectures about.
Unfortunately, there’s also the “bad” self-promotion. This is the kind that we are taught to loathe in academia. The kind that involves seeking out the press, trumping up your findings, and becoming Dr. Oz. We are taught from the beginnings of grad school and even before to mistrust people who do this. If your science is good…well you shouldn’t HAVE to say anything. Build it and they will come. If you are trumpeting your science, holding press conferences, giving TED talks, and posing for magazines…scientists get very quick to mistrust your work. This is because behavior like this has a history, and it’s not a good one. Too many times, scientists like this have shot to fame in the public eye, and been shot down just as quickly. Self-promotion outside the ivory tower smacks of ego. The ideal scientist is the one that is famous only among other scientists.
Regular readers will notice that some of the above is reminiscent of a previous post I wrote discussing whether we can trust researchers who give TED talks.
The comments section of the post is very interesting, but I wanted to highlight one comment made by another blogger and researcher named Drug Monkey (my emphasis).
More on point, I do think it a bit of a problem to blog too closely to one’s own area. It just seems like an unfair extra attack on the scientific arguments.
A blogger could easily pursue an agenda that had positive effects on their next grant review by creating a bigger sense of Significance. Could tear down the competition too.
Fighting for Open Access and against GlamourMagification…ditto. Fighting the good fight on work hours, dual careers, geographical immobility….it gets slippery.
I don’t disagree that blogging about your own work could have an impact on the field, but I don’t think it is necessarily nefarious. I responded in the comments on Sci’s post, but thought it would be good to repost the comment here:
I’ve always been surprised by the view that blogging about your own work is somehow not Kosher (keeping in mind that I’m a bit biased since this was explicitly one of the reasons why Peter and I began blogging in the first place, and our field of study lends itself to knowledge translation activities). If it’s ok to do a plenary session or media interview or editorial/review paper explaining how your work fits into the larger context, I don’t see why it’s off-side to post similar things on a blog. Trashing another research group at a conference or in a Letter to the Editor would have at least as large an impact on the field as doing so on a blog, no?
I don’t disagree that this can potentially lead to changes in a paper’s citation count or its impact on the field, but is that by default a bad thing? Is it better for a good paper to languish uncited because it’s in a journal no one reads, or is it better for people to find out about that paper on your blog? If a person were lying about their own research that’s one thing, but if I you are telling people accurate information about your own work as well as other work in your field of research, I don’t see why this should be a problem. And as Sci points out, if you start playing up your work as something it’s not, that is going to bite you in the butt pretty quickly.
The one qualification that I would add is that if you are writing about your own work, I think it’s critical that you let people know it’s your own. Trashing your competitors and praising your own work, without letting your readers know about your conflict of interest, would be absolutely inappropriate. But if you are transparent about your position and potential bias, then I think it’s a completely legitimate form of scientific communication.
So, is it ok to blog about your own work? Does it matter whether you do so under your real name? If it’s not ok to blog about your own work, is it still ok to do media interviews and other forms of more traditional self-promotion?
I’m curious to hear what people think. But first, please do go read Sci’s awesome post.
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Travis
What science blog networks do you visit most frequently?
Jan 10th
It’s no secret that the science blogosphere has undergone massive changes in the past 18 months. There have been new networks (Scientopia, PLoS BLoGs), dramatically expanded/revamped networks (Scientific American, The Guardian, Wired), and networks that are under new management (Scienceblogs). There are even networks that have stuck around through it all, largely unchanged (Nature Network).
I’ve come to come to think of these networks as each representing a distinct niche in the science blogosphere. These niches may not perfectly represent each network, but they’re what I associate with the network, and what I look for when I’m visiting.
Scienceblogs is where I go to find animated discussions about atheism, skepticism, and climate science. Deep Sea News is where I go for things related to oceans and aquatic animals. Scientopia’s bloggers are mostly active researchers, and on any given day their network has excellent posts on what it’s like to be a scientist - from trainee right through to PI. Conversely, PLoS BloGGers are mostly science journalists, who often discuss issues related to their work, as well as large dollops of actual journalistic pieces (there are also a few active researchers there, myself included). Like PLoS Blogs, Wired and Discover seem to be written mainly by professional journalists, doing science journalism. And then there’s the new Scientific American blog network, which is a pleasant mix of several things - journalists, scientists, etc.
I like this new science blogosphere, as it offers a number of different experiences to suit different tastes and even different moods (I find that I enjoy Scientopia while working in the lab, but prefer to read the more journalistic pieces on PLoS BLoGs and Scientific American in my free time).
With all of these choices, I’m curious to know what networks people read most frequently. The survey below allows you to rank the 3 networks that you visit most frequently (excluding any networks where you contribute regularly). I’m assuming that Scienceblogs still has the most absolute visitors, but I’m interested to hear how the various networks rank, and why people put them in that order. I’ve tried to get in the ones that I read and hear about most frequently, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. That being said, some of these networks are far more “niche” than others, so it may not be entirely fair to compare them all head-to-head.
Feel free to suggest ones that I might have missed in the comments. Now go ahead and vote! Check back next week for the final tally.
Travis
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Scienceblogging Roundup: July 3-9
Jul 9th
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.
- The effects of churnalism on healthcare news and the public (PLoS Guest Blog)
- At a recent conference Rebecca Watson was propositioned in an elevator. She told people, and all hell broke loose. John Rennie examines the inhuman treatment Rebecca Watson has received this week, and makes the obvious but excellent point that it is wrong to make people pointlessly uncomfortable (Gleaming Retort)
- Researchers at Johns Hopkins claim they can track public health trends using twitter (Johns Hopkins University)
- Is it beneficial for obesity researchers to build trust with industry? (Obesity Panacea)
- Scientific American has unveiled their new blog network, which has an absolutely amazing lineup (including the only lineup of the major science blogging networks that is more than 50% female). Congrats to former Scibling and Plogster Bora Zivkovic for assembling such a terrific crew, and to all of the bloggers who have joined the network! (Scientific American)
Those are the posts that caught our eye this week. Have a great weekend!
Travis
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
