As part of URO’s programme of research staff development, we’re currently running a series of workshops on how to get the most out of the web. Part of these sessions focuses on the benefits of blogging your research. Among other things, it can help you publicise your work more widely; hear what others have to say about it, as well as find potential collaborators.
With this in mind, why not check out researchblogging.org a website which attempts to collect all blog posts about peer-reviewed research in one easily searchable list. From the home page you can narrow by topic and/or date. The blogs it links to are invariably good quality, with often thought-provoking discussions of research papers, making researchblogging.org a worthwhile resource.
It’s regularly updated with new posts, so the easiest way of keeping track is to subscribe to the RSS feed for the particular topic you’re interested in. To do this, just click RSS near the top of the page and scroll down to the feed you want to follow.
If you’re interested in learning more about how RSS feeds like this can help you stay on top of the news that’s relevant to you, come along to our Working Smarter with the Web workshops. We’ll be running them monthly while demand is high – March is currently booked up but there will be another in April. I’ll also be posting about this in the future.
The researchblogging website offers a means of getting a quick, lighthearted and often straightforward description of some of the more relevant and recent papers out there.
It also gives you a feel for the subjects people are talking about in your field and may even act as a platform to form contacts (given all the peer-review and opinion-sharing happening on these blogs).
Seems like this may be one of those up-and-coming ‘hot topics’ – in the near future more people than ever may be blogging about their research and that of others (increasing those citation rates!).
ehh.. love it