The personal blog was a defining feature of the early internet and there are still a number of high-profile academic blogs studiously maintained by lone scholars. However, for researchers new to academic blogging, is it still worth setting up your own …
Category: academic blogging
Why don’t you publish your research here?
Justin Gest author of Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media asks why not publish your research outside of academic outlets? And, suggests academic institutions need to engage more creatively with an increasingly diverse range of mul…
Why are Asian Academic Regulatory Bodies wary of blogging?
Blogs and blogging are an important medium for communication. In the Anglophone world they have taken on a particular significance within the academic community as a medium for discussing cross cutting issues that affect the universities sector. In this post Santosh C. Hulagabali argues that in Asia and India in particular, the dearth of institutional blogs has limited public discussion […]
Science community blogs: recognising value and measuring reach
Blogs have evolved into an established academic genre and a valuable forum for alternative journalism and public education. Manu Saunders draws a distinction between science communication blogs and science community blogs, with the latter offering academics the opportunity to strengthen writing skills and develop new collaborations, while also being a source of advice and mentorship for students, women, and other […]
How to plan, create and launch a successful multi-author academic blog
A multi-author blog collective is an effective way for a university or other knowledge-based institution to host discussion and debate. As part of a series previewing their book Communicating Your Research with Social Media, Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams look at how to set up an institution-based multi-author blog platform; from planning all the way to launch. Planning and launching a social […]
An antidote to futility: Why academics (and students) should take blogging / social media seriously
Blogs are now an established part of the chattersphere/public conversation, especially in international development circles, but Duncan Green finds academic take-up lacking. Here he outlines the major arguments for taking blogging and social media seriously. It doesn’t need to become another onerous time-commitment. Reading a blog should be like listening to the person talk, but with links. Before I started […]
Media Training for Academics: The importance of an editorial mission for creating consistent content.
There is now substantial space and appetite for academic content on the web, but maintaining momentum on these platforms can be an uphill struggle with other pressing teaching and research priorities. Kevin Anselmo looks at what researchers can learn from media companies and argues it is important to think about the driving forces that will enable you to execute your content […]
A tale of two scholarly blog platforms: comparing and conceptualizing online research communities.
Cornelius Puschmann and Marco Bastos expand on the computational methods employed to understand the contributions and online networks of two prominent scholarly blog platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses. Their analysis suggests one community is driven more by an emphasis on the new media movement and cross-disciplinary aspiration, compared to the other’s more traditional disciplinary approach with a focus on the new […]
A blog may get you street credibility, but for formal academic recognition, books are still the preferred medium.
Could blogs replace books? Michael Piotrowski reflects on the current scholarly debate surrounding immediacy and impact of academic work. A significant issue for blogs is the lack of formal recognition, largely down to the general lack of pre-publication peer review. Books are more formal in all respects, but this doesn’t disqualify blogs per se. Blogs and books have different strengths and weaknesses […]
Shorter, better, faster, free: Blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated
Academic blogging gets your work and research out to a potentially massive audience at very, very low cost and relative amount of effort. Patrick Dunleavy argues blogging and tweeting from multi-author blogs especially is a great way to build knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate […]