Nowadays most of my science readings come from Google Reader. I have mainly 2 folders: “bio” for scientific journals and “bioblogs” for Blogs.
I can “read” “bio” in a half a day per week or so (I have more than 30 feeds). I need almost a day for “bioblogs” (less than 15 feeds). The number of articles on “bio” is probably one or two orders of magnitude higher then the one on “bioblogs”.
To put in another way: I consider the blog content to be of much higher quality than the scientific journal counterpart…
…And I think I know the reason…
…Currently, scientists are mostly evaluated by their ability to publish in scientific journals (that postdoc grant, financing a project, getting a tenure…), so there is strong pressure to publish. People publish everything that is, in their self evaluation is… good publishable.
On the other hand, blogging is still mostly something people do because they want and they feel is valuable.
Of course, we can already see, informally, that people profit from blogging (make contacts, publicity, etc). I would bet that in the near future, blogging will be in formal evaluation processes also (I can already smell measures of quantity of blog posts, inbound links and stuff…).
Care to make a prediction on the average quality of blog content in the future?
4 Comments to "Average quality of science information sources"
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What blogs do you read?
I’ve stop being a lazy bastard and updated the links list in the blog with what I currently read.
The list, although being small still varies a lot, from software development, to “typical” bioinformatics, to drug design…
Great blog Tiago.
You definitely got a point about people profiting from their blogs. I don’t make any money from mine - there’s no advertising. But I will probably profit if I go for a job interview and I put a link to it on my CV.
People running open science blogs profit even more, many different people offering points of view on their scientific problems.
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