The science blogging archive Rogue Scholar launched a new feature this week: author profile pages. This feature is similar to functionality common to blogging platforms, but integrates all blog posts by a given author that were archived in Rogue Scholar.

The functionality depends on an ORCID assigned to the blog post author (currently 34% of all Rogue Scholar posts), and uses information from the authors public profile page, including given and family names, affiliations with start dates, and the optional biography. Below this information you find some basic numbers similar to what Rogue Scholar blog communities show, and a searchable listing of all blog posts by that author.

Given and family names are important because blog feeds (Atom, RSS or JSONFeed, used by Rogue Scholar to extract blog post metadata) only know full names, but some Rogue Scholar authors have more complex names, including multiple given and/or family names.

The affiliation with start dates is important to assign an affiliation to a blog post author, as this depends on the public date and affiliations may change over time. My Rogue Scholar profile lists my four affiliations since starting blogging in 2007 and allows filtering of blog posts by affiliation. Multiple affiliations in parallel are currently not supported by Rogue Scholar, but luckily that is currently uncommon. This feature uses the ROR affiliation identifier, and this affiliation information is included in all blog posts archived in Rogue Scholar and registered with Crossref. ROR unfortunately doesn't assigned identifiers to single-person organizations such as Front Matter, I hope to address this in the future (either ROR relaxes its policy and/or I am able to hire more Front Matter staff).

The biography field in ORCID metadata is a nice way to have a brief publicly available summary that you can share, but this field is currently not widely used - maybe Rogue Scholar can change this for blog authors.

Author names and affiliations are functionalities that have been built-in into the Rogue Scholar backend for a while, but have now been made available to the new Rogue Scholar profiles as part of a larger ongoing refactoring effort.

Author metadata are the biggest metadata pain point when working with science blog posts in Rogue Scholar. My hope is that these new Rogue Scholar author profiles not only help increase the visibility of science blog authors, but also help with metadata quality, including more authors providing their ORCIDs. One continuing challenge is a mismatch of author names in the blog feed with what is published in the blog web page. The three main reasons are lack of support for multiple authors in RSS feeds and WordPress (without using plugins), and blogs using group authors as a proxy. While group authorship may sometimes makes sense, it is often blurring authorship, in particular when artificial intelligence increasingly is generating content instead of humans.

For these reasons Rogue Scholar is strongly encouraging individual authorship, and can help science blogs support that. In this context Rogue Scholar is also supporting contributor roles – which Crossref will support in its next metadata schema update – which might be helpful for multi-author content. In the future Rogue Scholar might stop supporting group authorship for the same reasons.

Author profile pages are of course not limited to science blogs, but make sense for many digital researcher platforms. For DataCite Commons I helped implement similar functionality in 2020, and in 2011 (before ORCID was launched) I implemented ScienceCard as a author-focussed fork of the PLOS Article-Level Metrics service.

The Rogue Scholar author profile pages are a customization of the InvenioRDM repository platform and may also be of interest to other InvenioRDM instances. Currently the profile pages use a semi-manual workflow with author metadata obtained from ORCID and stored in a yaml vocabulary, in the future this should be automated to better keep author information in sync, ideally with ORCID more consistently using ROR affiliation metadata in its profile pages.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2025, May 6). Personal names in science blogs. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r5fw0-tdd11
  2. Fenner, M. (2025, October 27). Supporting blog contributions beyond authorship. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9t6xx-kht30
  3. Fenner, M. (2020, October 29). DataCite Commons at your service. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r79r7fh-97aq74v-ag4m5
  4. Fenner, M. (2011, November 20). ScienceCard named Finalist in Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw62