An Orgy of Self-Referential Blogging...
Neuroscience

An Orgy of Self-Referential Blogging...




...may follow from a new PLoS ONE paper on bloggers whose posts are aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org (Shema et al., 2012):
The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.

The Neurocritic has never been one for meta-blogging.1 I don't like to draw attention to my existence as an actual person, and I don't have time to discuss things like the pros/cons of blogging, scientific outreach, gender imbalances, scientist bloggers vs. science writer bloggers, commenting policies, and blogging networks. It's not that these aren't worthwhile topics, it's just that it's not my thing.

For those issues, I recommend reading Scicurious, who has blogged thoughtfully (and extensively) about them. As you can see in the figure below, she's a major player in the RB science blogging tweeting universe.


Figure 3 (modified from Shema et al., 2012). Twitter interconnections – followers.


In a way, I feel like this article is the peer-reviewed equivalent of a link bait site that names you as a Top Fifty Psychology Blog, just asking for egotistical bloggers to post about it.

Well I'm not falling for it...


Footnote

1 That said, The Neurocritic's last post jokingly mentioned self-referential processing in the context of linking to oneself, but that was only because I actually have written extensively on spindle neurons, aka von Economo neurons.


Reference

Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869




- Bloggers Behind The Blogs: Dave Munger
This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers. Next up, Dave Munger of the Research Blogging consortium and the hugely popular, but now discontinued, Cognitive Daily. How did...

- The Bloggers Behind The Blogs: Scarlett De Courcier
This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers. Next up, Scarlett De Courcier of Ramblings of an Academic Petrolhead, Paracademia and 28 others! How did you become a psychology/neurosci...

- Bloggers Behind The Blogs: Petra Boynton
This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers. Next up, Petra Boynton of Dr Petra. How did you become a psychology blogger? Initially because I was doing a lot of work with mainstream...

- Promoting Academic Writing
Interesting piece in today's New York Times about writers taking promotional book "tours" via blogs: The Author Will Take Q.’s Now By KARA JESELLA Published: September 2, 2007 [snip] Bloggers have written about books since, well, the beginning of...

- Scienceonline09
... is a conference I wish I could have attended. The third annual science blogging conference took place Jan. 16-18, 2009 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The wiki states that the "goal [was] to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators,...



Neuroscience








.