How is research blogged? A content analysis approach

Abstract

Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of peer-reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to gain insight into bloggers' motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010 to 2012 in Researchblogging.org's health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with 10 major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self-cite and that 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. Nevertheless, almost 30% of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed.

On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

“…This supports the idea that Mendeley readership could be useful for the analysis and evaluation of these document types, especially given that most of them are traditionally excluded from citation analysis (Waltman et al, 2011) due to their lower citation frequency. The popularity of these other document types has been reported for other altmetrics, particularly for Twitter (Haustein et al, 2015) and research blogs (Schema, Bar-Ilan, & Thelwall, 2015). This stronger presence of other document types in Mendeley also suggests that Mendeley readership may capture a mix of citation and social media patterns, since documents with different relevance for citations and social media are reasonably saved in Mendeley (e.g.…”

Blog Citations as Indicators of the Societal Impact of Research: Content Analysis of Social Sciences Blogs

“…There were also 150 cases where blog posts and cited articles were both from the same year. 13.7% of articles cited in blogs were at least 14 years old (this figure was 7% for health blogs (Shema, Bar-Ilan, and Thelwall, 2014b) Table 5. Blog post references by cited article publication year (rows) and blog post publication year (columns) Fig.…”

“…Overall, the number of content analysis and qualitative studies on research blogs are limited and only one study (Shema, Bar-Ilan, and Thelwall, 2014b) exists in this area. Most of the altmetric studies also focus on health or basic sciences and rarely deal with social sciences.…”

On Developing Extraction Rules for Mining Informal Scientific References from Altmetric Data Sources

“…Young researchers with high presence on Twitter also tend to blog as well and have high networking with similar researchers [11]. Unlike Twitter, blogs are thought to be an effective medium for initiating discourse [12]. A collection of research paper samples from Delicious, Mendeley, Twitter and Wikipedia revealed that 62% of them were present of Mendeley with insignificant presence on other platforms [16].…”