Communications in Blogademia: An Assessment of Scholar Blogs’ Attributes and Functions

Abstract

Traditional, peer-reviewed, and formally published communications are a staple of the scholarly record. So too are the informal communications of scholars. Blogs may be seen to represent such communications. But, are blogs scholarship? Though blogging is ongoing in academe for about a decade, there is limited empirical reporting on how blogs are perceived as both a product and process of scholarly communication. This paper reports select findings from a descriptive study of blogging scholars from the fields of history, economics, law, biology, chemistry, and physics. Findings, drawn primarily from 153 completed questionnaires, are complemented by select interview excerpts and blog analysis data. Most questionnaire respondents (80%) consider their blogs as a component of their respective cumulative and persistent scholarly record, with a majority (66%) agreeing that their blog satisfies the criteria for scholarship for unpublished communications. Blogging is seen to contribute to improvements across multiple aspects of respondents’ scholarly lives and leads to invitations to publish, present, serve, and collaborate. These results are of use to blogging scholars, as support for their activity; administrators and peers, to provide context for assessing the potential value of these communications; and information organizations, including libraries and archives, to inform considerations for collecting and stewarding these communications into the future.