The Science of Science Blogging Literature

This morning, Antoine Blanchard tweeted to me a SUPERB list of scholarly articles on science blogging!

I thought I'd re-create his list here, with links to the full-texts that I could find. I've also included a few of my own citations. This list should be helpful to anyone studying the science of science blogging, like me! Or, just anyone interested in knowing a bit more about science blogging, how it works, and who science bloggers are.

I'm currently doing my PhD dissertation on the practices of science blogging. To find out more about my research, and to help me conduct a large-scale survey of science bloggers, please visit this Experiment.com page.

Science Blogging. Shutterstock: http://ow.ly/C0dcG

2014

1. Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions. Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 13, No. 3. (2014) by Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann

2. Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(5), 1018-1027, (2014), by Shema, H., Bar‐Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M.

“We hypothesized that articles receiving blog citations close to their publication time receive more journal citation later on than the articles in the same journal published in the same year that did not receive such blog citations.”

3. (Micro)Blogging Science? Notes on Potentials and Constraints of New Forms of Scholarly Communication. In Opening Science (2014), pp. 89-106, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_6, by Cornelius Puschmann, edited by Sönke Bartling, Sascha Friesike

4. Blogging in Academia, A Personal Experience. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (20 February 2014), by Arthur Charpentier.

“academic blogs can be seen as a missing link, between the conversational style of conferences and seminars and the rigid written style of academic articles”

5. How is research blogged? A content analysis approach. J Assn Inf Sci Tec (1 July 2014), doi:10.1002/asi.23239, by Hadas Shema, Judit Bar-Ilan, Mike Thelwall

“health research bloggers rarely self-cite and … the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with more than one quarter providing health-related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider, nonacademic audience.”

6. Academic Blogging, a Personal Experience. 2014, by A. Charpentier

7. “Blogging my Academic Self.” Illuminating How Identities, Stereotypes and Inequalities Matter through Gender Studies, 2014, pp 3-8, by Jenny L. Davis

8. Becoming a blogger: Trajectories, norms, and activities in a community of practice. (Link, not open access). Computers in Human Behavior, 2014, by Vanessa P. Dennen

2013

9. Blogging on the ice: Connecting audiences with climate-change sciences. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics (March 2013), pp. 87-101, doi:10.1386/macp.9.1.87_1, by Einar Thorsen

10. Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges. Studies in Higher Education, Vol. 38, No. 8. (1 October 2013), pp. 1105-1119, doi:10.1080/03075079.2013.835624, by Inger Mewburn, Pat Thomson

“A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice.”

11. Public Communication of Science in Blogs: Recontextualizing Scientific Discourse for a Diversified Audience. (Link, not open access). Written Communication (19 June 2013), doi:10.1177/0741088313493610, by María J. Luzón

12. Hybridism, edutainment, and doubt: Science blogging finding its feet. Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1. (2013), pp. 7-36, by Anna Mauranen

13. Blogs as Interfaces between Several Worlds: A Case Study of the Swedish Academic Blogosphere. Human IT: Journal for Information Technology Studies as a Human Science, Vol. 10, No. 3. (2013), by Sara Kjellberg

“blogs do not replace a previous form of communication, but function as distinct interfaces between four arenas: the university, the research field, the general public, and private life.”

14. The Role of Metadiscourse in Negotiating Trust in the Communication of Science by Blog. Journal of Scientific Temper, Vol. 1, No. 3-4. (July 2013), pp. 119-142, by Lawrence G. Souder, Jean-Claude Bradley

15. Science Blogging: Networks, Boundaries and Limitations. (Link, not open access). Science as Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1. (16 July 2013), pp. 51-72, doi:10.1080/09505431.2013.801420, by Hauke Riesch, Jonathan Mendel

“There is limited research into the realities of science blogging, how science bloggers themselves view their activity and what bloggers can achieve.”

16. Journalism and social media as means of observing the contexts of science. BioScience, 63(4), 284-287.

“neuroscientists continue to use traditional journalistic media more often than blogs and social networks for information seeking…”

2012

17. Has blogging changed science writing? Journal of Science Communication, 2012, by Alice Bell

18. Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice. Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 17, No. 3. (12 June 2012), pp. 348-354, doi:10.1080/13555502.2012.689502, by Rohan Maitzen

19. Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 5. (11 May 2012), e35869, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035869, by Hadas Shema, Judit Bar-Ilan, Mike Thelwall

“Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs… The average [ResearchBlogging.org] blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.”

journal.pone.0050109.g002

20. Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0. PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 12. (12 December 2012), e50109, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050109, by Sibele Fausto, Fabio A. Machado, Luiz F. Bento, Atila Iamarino, Tatiana R. Nahas, David S. Munger

21. Can blogging change how ecologists share ideas? In economics, it already has. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 5, No. 2. (10 November 2012), doi:10.4033/iee.2012.5b.15.f, by Jeremy Fox

22. Scholarly Blogging: A New Form of Publishing or Science Journalism 2.0? In Science and the Internet (2012), pp. 171-181, by Cornelius Puschmann, Merja Mahrt

23. Online Talk: How Exposure to Disagreement in Online Comments Affects Beliefs in the Promise of Controversial Science. (Google book). In Citizen Voices: Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication (2012), pp. 119-135, by A. A. Anderson, D. Brossard, D. A. Scheufele, Michael A. Xenos

24. "ScienceBlogs Is a High School Clique, Nature Network Is a Private Club": Imagining the Communities of Online Science. Revue Canadienne d'Études Médiatiques (Canadian Journal of Media Studies), Vol. Special Issue Fall 2012 (2012), pp. 240-265, by Alice Bell

“What I think my study shows is a desire on the part of many bloggers to do the sorts of work that might be dubbed ‘outreach’ or ‘public engagement’; a sense that they have a lot to gain from this and/ or that it might be their duty.’

25. Scientists’ Blogs: Glimpses Behind the Scenes. In The Sciences’ Media Connection – Public Communication and its Repercussions, Vol. 28 (2012), pp. 273-289, doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2085-5_14, by Brian Trench

2011

26. Science blogs in research and popularization of science: why, how and for whom? In Common Knowledge: The Challenge of Transdisciplinarity (2011), pp. 219-232, by Antoine Blanchard

27. More than a blog. EMBO Rep, Vol. 12, No. 11. (14 November 2011), pp. 1102-1105, doi:10.1038/embor.2011.201, by Howard Wolinsky

28. Taking new routes: Blogs, Web sites, and Scientific Publishing. ScieCom info, Vol. 7, No. 2. (2011), by Helena Bukvova

“In this article I discuss author-controlled publishing on platforms like personal web pages, blogs, or social networking services. I argue, that these platforms can play an important role in the scientists’ self-presentation. As such, they do not compete with the traditional publishing platforms, but complement them.”

29. The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Spring 2011), by Laksamee Putnam

“A necessary part of this process is making it clear that blogging is more than a casual writing process. Blogging improves science outreach by allowing authors, from graduate students to tenured professionals, to more directly and more rapidly interact with their peers and the rest of the population.”

BloggingProsCons_Putnam

30. Science blogs as competing channels for the dissemination of science news. (Link, not open access). Journalism, Vol. 12, No. 7. (01 October 2011), pp. 889-902, doi:10.1177/1464884911412834, by Vinciane Colson

31. Science blogs as boundary layers: Creating and understanding new writer and reader interactions through science blogging. (Link, not open access). Journalism, Vol. 12, No. 7. (1 October 2011), pp. 903-919, doi:10.1177/1464884911412844, by Marie-Claire Shanahan

2010

32. Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities. Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 9, No. 1. (May 2010), by Inna Kouper

33. Live Coverage of Scientific Conferences Using Web Technologies. PLoS Comput Biol, Vol. 6, No. 1. (29 January 2010), e1000563, doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000563, by Allyson L. Lister, Ruchira S. Datta, Oliver Hofmann, et al.

34. I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday, Vol. 15, No. 8. (2 August 2010), by Sara Kjellberg

“The results show that their blogging is motivated by the possibility to share knowledge, that the blog aids creativity, and that it provides a feeling of being connected in their work as researchers. The blog serves in particular as a creative catalyst in the work of researchers, where writing forms a large part, which is not as prominent as a motivation in other professional blogs.”

Function and Blog Use

35. Scientific blogging as a model for professional networking online. Cellular Therapy and Transplantation, Vol. 2, No. 7. (2010), doi:10.3205/ctt-2010-en-000084.01 by Alexey Bersenev

36. Social Media and Microbiology Education. PLoS Pathog, Vol. 6, No. 10. (21 October 2010), e1001095, doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1001095, by Vincent R. Racaniello

 

Have other papers? Send them to me, or add them below in comments!