The science blog archive Rogue Scholar has now archived more than 55 thousand science blog posts with full-text content and rich metadata and published over the last 20 years. Time to have a closer look at what kind of scholarly content is published.

Looking at content categories helps to understand what defines a science blog post, and distinguishes it from other scholarly output formats. We can then decide whether there is content we want to see more, e.g. because it is not found in other venues such as preprint servers, journals, or social media posts.

Rogue Scholar already classifies each blog posts by both language (currently 85% of posts are written in English) and subject category using the OpenAlex subfield and topic vocabularies. Content categories are something else: is the blog post for example reporting original research, a meeting report, or a review of a paper – all of them found frequently in science blogs. I want to propose a taxonomy of content categories for science blogs:

  1. Research findings. Original results, data or analyses published first (or only) on the blog.
  2. Methods and tools. How to do something: research practice, software, data and teaching material.
  3. Commentary and peer review. Critical engagement with other people's work: Reviews of papers, software, or books.
  4. Review. Bringing existing knowledge together or making it accessible: Literature overviews, explainers, “state of the field” posts, accessible summaries of one’s own papers
  5. Editorial. Arguments and positions on the field or on research practice: Essays, policy positions, open science advocacy.
  6. Community news. The research community and working life: Conference reports, announcements, obituaries, interviews, career advice, lab news, job postings, reflections on teaching.
  7. Microblogs. Short, informal posts similar to social media: a single observation, link or reaction, with little or no argument.

It is no coincidence that the list has seven categories: that is the level of differentiation I can understand, even if means some details are conflated. I hope this posts generates a discussion that refines the list. Not more categories, but potentially different labels or groupings. This starting list helps clarify some questions that I wondered about ever since I started Rogue Scholar.

If you give science blogs long-term archiving, a central aggregated search, DOIs and metadata, what makes them different from preprints? Research findings contains content that you also find in preprints. The differences are mainly that a science blog can be self-hosted, and that the publication workflow is simpler. Self-hosting allows for experimentation such as embedding code and data with blogging platforms such as Quarto, but basically research fundings can also be published as preprints, journal articles, or conference papers.

Methods and tools is a very common category of science blog posts, and arguably far more common than research findings. One important reason is that there are not many venues where descriptions of methods and tools can be published, and this kind of long-tail content aligns nicely with a self-hosted blog rather than a central platform. A special flavor of this category is teaching material, which might get aggregated by a teaching institution.

Commentary and peer review is a very common and old category of science blog posts, and is a good fit for the format. Research Blogging was a platform (now defunct) that tried to aggregate science blog posts in this category. Rogue Scholar could spend more effort highlighting this category, it currently only has a semi-automated research blogging community with about 150 posts, and a book review community with currently 330 reviews. The more formalized approaches of peer review with dedicated peer review platforms that appeared in recent years more centralized and is currently not using blogging technology.

Reviews can be informal overviews of the existing literature, or more formal systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Most science blogging tools have no easy integration with references, making typically reference-heavy reviews more complicated to write as a science blog post. In contrast, accessible summaries of a scholarly publication are very common, and a good fit for the scholarly blog format.

Editorials are an established category in journals. The difference in editorials as science blog post is not so much the format, but rather the voice. With a self-hosted blog anyone (or any group of people) can write a editorial.

Community news is another popular category in science blogs, in particular in blogs run by organizations rather than individuals. You find similar content in journals that provide a front matter section, e.g. Nature, Science or PNAS. Interestingly, this journal front matter content often also is registered with DOIs, even if it isn't describing research findings. For journals that don't provide a front matter section and for preprint servers, science blogs provide an excellent platform for community news, and that is an area that will probably grow, in particular when reused to also generate newsletters and/or when interviews are published as podcasts.

Microblogs are a weird category, as they are more about the format than the content. It is basically a different term of what we know as a social media post, and what used be very popular for scholarly communication from ca. 2010 to ca. 2022 (before algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content became commonplace). They serve more as a signal that links to something interesting (altmetrics) than their content itself. The future of scholarly microblogs is very much tied to the future of social media, in particular federated protocols such as ActivityPub and AT Protocol.

In summary, research findings, commentary and peer review, reviews, and editorials are covered by other publishing platforms, but science blogs can complement via a unique (decentralized) perspective.

Methods and tools (including teaching material) and community news very often have no good publication venues, and science blogs can fill important gaps with a low barrier to entry.

The future of microblogs is not clear to me, as social media are even more rapidly changing right now, and the importance of long-term archiving, persistent identifiers and defined scholarly metadata is less defined.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2026, January 29). Rogue Scholar is improving subject classification (Version 3). Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/76vm1-yme44
  2. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158
  3. Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE, 7(5), e35869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035869
  4. Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.12684249