Research Blogging

This week (at the suggestion of a reader) I submitted a request to have Penny University registered with Research Blogging.  I am very happy to say that we were approved and are now officially a ‘research blog’ (or at least have the potential to be a ‘research blog’).

Research Blogging is a site where blog posts that reference peer-reviewed research are compiled for easy identification under appropriate categories and by relevant tags.  I have registered Penny University under ‘Research / Scholarship : Science Communication’, but I will be able to tag individual posts with more subject-specific tags (such as biology, archaeology, geology, etc).  It seemed like the best fit for what we do here!

Now, by the very nature of Penny University, not many of our posts will meet the guidelines.  This is because the majority of our posts are about active research projects (and many just in their early stages), which are frequently unpublished.  But every now and then (and we have one coming up) an interviewee may refer to an article during our discussion and in this instance, I will be able to submit that post to Research Blogging.  These posts will be identifiable on Penny University by the inclusion of the “Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research” icon and a full citation for the articles referenced.  The post will then be listed on the Research Blogging front page and a reference to the post will remain in their database (under the category and by the tags) so that people looking for posts on specific topics can find it in the future!

This is a very useful system, not only for identifying serious blog posts about peer-reviewed research, but it also ensures that the research we feature here on Penny University gets as wide an audience as possible.  While Penny University was founded with the purpose of bringing information about less well-known research projects to the general public, there is no reason why it shouldn’t also bring this information to the academic audience (who to be fair, probably don’t know about it either*).  It may even be a good way to help encourage networking between researchers around the world.  And that can only be a good thing!

Turrah!

*Unless they are your supervisor/advisor**, share your office/lab***, or witnessed a conference presentation/poster****.

**And even then they may not actually know what your research is about, if we’re being totally honest.

***Ditto.

***Ditto.