Research Blog Research Articles

Nepal Family Cohort study: a study protocol

IntroductionThe Nepal Family Cohort study uses a life course epidemiological approach to collect comprehensive data on children’s and their parents’ environmental, behavioural and metabolic risk factors. These factors can affect...

Straight from the heart and “out of mind”: strategies for managers to navigate workplace romance

Purpose Workplace romance presents both opportunities and challenges for organizations, requiring strategic HR leadership to navigate effectively. This study explores the dynamics of workplace romance, its impact on organizational culture and performance, and strategic HR approaches to manage this complex phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach Information and data from various research blogs and websites have been studied to understand the concept of workplace romance and insights drawn by proposing a few practices for HR leaders. Findings This practitioner paper indicates a positive relationship and develops insights into how HR leaders’ good strategic practices help manage and mitigate workplace romance challenges. Practical implications HR leaders can foster a positive work environment while minimizing the risks associated with workplace relationships by developing clear policies, providing training and education, promoting transparency and fairness, implementing conflict resolution mechanisms and monitoring enforcement. Originality/value This paper explores the dynamics of workplace romance and its impact on organizational culture and performance. It also provides fresh insights into strategic HR approaches to managing this complex phenomenon in the workplace.

Hybridism, edutainment, and doubt: Science blogging finding its feet

Blogs have become everyday acquaintances in digital life. Although personal, political, and fashion blogs may be the best known, academics also engage in blogging about research. With fast-expanding digital publishing of all kinds, we may have to rethink the status of blogging in relation to our on-going research. This article discusses the perception of science blogs, and their status as a genre. It explores some blog threads talking about research blogging: are blogs a great way to improve outreach, or just dumbing down? Should we use blogs for publishing serious findings, or brush them aside as edutainment – preferably done by somebody else? Research blogs are explored in the context of science communication and research writing traditions, and their old and new features discussed.

The Quality Blog: Proposal of a New Format in Lieu of Academic Research Blog

Academic institutions are exploring new mediums for publishing and disseminating research output; in this article, the author is primarily focused on the role of Academic Research Blog (ARB) maintained by universities, departments, or groups of scholars. The author investigated the typical patterns and flaws of the current ARB; the analysis suggests that there is a need, and therefore an opportunity, to upgrade it in a new format, which the author calls the Quality Blog. The Quality Blog is defined by a set of eighteen requirements (policies and characteristics). Some of these requirements are already present in the ARBs, while others are derived from the journal format. The novelty of the Quality Blog format that is proposed consists in applying together all of these eighteen requirements (policies and characteristics), inclusively. The Quality Blog will overcome the limitations that the ARBs have and be a more economically sound decision regarding costs for monograph and journal workflows. The ‘Quality’ attribute refers to three dimensions: contents, processes, and technology; the practical and operational choices that each Quality Blog will need to make regarding these three quality dimensions will determine the success and sustainability of the project throughout the course of time. In examining the blogs of the top thirty-eight business schools, the author investigates the blogs by cataloging the types of blogs and then the digital platform used. Of these institutions, 90 per cent have created and maintain blogs, and 51 per cent use the ARB powered by a content management system. These results reveal that the Quality Blog would be a new paradigm of research communications to adopt in place of ARB by higher education institutions, research groups, and initiatives interested in promoting academic publishing projects both in science, technology, and mathematics and in humanities and social science subject areas, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication.

University research blogs: constructing identity through language and images

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s concept of identity and its contemporary applications in the analyses of blogs, this study explores the practices bloggers use to construct their identities in research blogs accessible through university websites. The study focuses both on verbal as well as non-verbal strategies and their combinations, i.e. the interplay of words and images in the posts. The analysis of the interaction of texts and images builds on Martinec and Salway’s model of text-image relations. The corpus analysed consists of 80 posts from 16 different blogs affiliated with British and North American universities. The bloggers construct their online persona through multiple identity features dominated by their commitment to research and communicating their findings to wide audiences, employing the verbal and non-verbal tools in a close cooperation to send a coherent message.

Uso de Identificadores Persistentes e Research Blogging por Blogues Científicos em Língua Portuguesa e sua cobertura pela Altmetric

Objetivo: investiga o uso de identificadores persistentes e Research Blogging pela blogosfera científica em língua portuguesa e sua cobertura pela Altmetric por intermédio de um levantamento das citações de artigos em suas postagens.Métodos: Partindo da lista de blogues cadastrados no portal Anel de Blogs Científicos (ABC), foram efetuadas buscas no Google com o objetivo de identificar os blogues em português que citam em suas postagens artigos com identificadores persistentes como o DOI, PMID ou ArXiv, ou que integram a iniciativa Research Blogging que vincula postagens com citações de pesquisas em revistas acadêmicas.Resultados: Os dados sistematizados permitiram realizar consultas no sítio da Altmetric e verificar a sua cobertura. Como resultado levantamos que dos 460 blogues listados no ABC, apenas 109 blogues fizeram citações com identificadores persistentes, 35 participavam da iniciativa Research Blogging e 42 eram mapeados pela Altmetric. Discussões sobre a representatividade dos blogues científicos em português na comunicação científica foram conduzidas com base nos resultados apurados.Conclusões: A falta de padronização das citações em blogues foi apontada como um dos fatores responsáveis pela baixa cobertura dos blogues de língua portuguesa pelo indicador altmétrico. Foi indicada também uma possível ação para minorar esta sub-representação da blogosfera em língua portuguesa.

Lifetime Active Care: A qualitative study of long-term family carers of people with spinal cord injury in Australia.

This study reports the findings of a qualitative, grounded theory study which explored the experiences of partners and other long-term family carers living with and supporting loved ones with spinal cord injury. The study is exploratory in that little was previously known about the experience of long-term care-giving in this context in Australia. Most research in this area has focused on this experience during the first 5years postinjury. This study focuses on the experiences of family carers beyond that 5-year period. The study aimed to explore the experience of partners and other long-term family carers of people with spinal cord injury, and illuminate their daily lives, interests, concerns and caring approaches in this context. Data collection included in-depth interviews, a focus group and an on-line, password-protected research blog for participant narrative reflections. Findings revealed that the experience of long-term caring is complex, all-encompassing and lifelong. This experience is conceptualised here as lifetime active care which always involves what we describe as protective, negotiated, surreptitious and strategic caring. These dimensions of caring are interdependent and deeply embedded in the daily, active support provided by long-term carers of people with spinal cord injury. We argue that carers in this context are involved in processes that have, in other contexts, been conceptualised as narrative reconstruction and also that the four dimensions of caring identified involve significant emotion work. The social processes of lifetime active care may shed light on the experiences of family carers in other long-term care contexts.

Reshaping the teaching–research nexus: connecting with students through research blogging (with an autoethnographic perspective) before they become lawyers

ABSTRACT The literature chronicles an ongoing debate about the teaching–research nexus in higher education. This article details how the author, a law lecturer, has built on the Humboldtian notion of the unity of teaching and research by blogging his research to his practical legal training students in an online teaching environment. With a focus on concern for learners as they soon become Australian lawyers, the article describes how the author blogs to raise awareness of his research, along with promoting a vibrant learning space. Attitudes to commercial law, and socio-legal, ethical, well-being and work–life balance issues, are some of the matters arising from the research. Whilst these issues may be at the edge of the traditional curriculum knowledge that students require to become lawyers, they impact on students seeking to make sense of career success in a competitive job market. The article will highlight how students connect with the blog. Some of the blog posts have an autoethnographic perspective drawing on the author’s experiences as a law student and lawyer that is pertinent to the research. All of these aspects come together to demonstrate the strengthening of the teaching–research nexus with an emphasis on students preparing to become lawyers.

“Finishing One Big Adventure in Order to Embark on Another”: Exploring University Research Blogs

The article focuses on blogs related to research activities of the academic community. Research-related blogs as components of university websites have developed into an array of sub-genres shaped by specific foci, their authors and the desired audiences. The data set consists of fifty posts from ten blogs of six universities. Drawing upon Swales’ methodology of genre analysis, the study explores the generic structure of the blog posts, reveals the communicative purposes they can fulfil within the landscape of university websites, identifies significant communication strategies, and explores the roles the blogs may serve in communicating science to the diverse audiences they potentially address. The analysis has shown that the blogs help accomplish the general goals of informing about the university and promoting it providing a personalized view and engaging the reader, manifest loose but recurrent generic structuring, and can be vehicles of knowledge dissemination as well as knowledge construction.

Re-Imagining Artistic Subjectivities within Community Projects

In this article an artist and an academic consider how the idea of subjectivities manifests itself in community projects. Taking an example of an ‘artist-in-residence’ on a co-produced research project, the authors experientially consider how their work has been articulated and presented. We draw on a dialogue, jointly written on a research blog, to discuss this. We consider collective forms of theory building and whether it is possible to re-imagine theory within a future-oriented process. The approach is necessarily fragmented and, as within any co-produced enquiry, poly-vocal. We aim to open a window on an iterative thinking process moving between and across domains. We do not desire consensus or agreement; nothing is settled or sedimented within this text.

#Psychology: a bibliometric analysis of psychological literature in the online media

Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012. Traditional publication metrics (e.g., number of citations, impact factor) and alternative metrics (collected from Altmetric, a website that collects and counts references as they appear in Wikipedia, public policy documents, research blogs, mainstream media, or social networks) were extracted and compared, using a dataset of over 245,000 publications from the Web of Science. Results show positive, small to medium, correlations on the level of individual publications, and frequently medium to high correlations on the level of research fields of Psychology. The more accumulated the level of analysis, the higher the correlations. These findings are fairly robust over time and comparable to findings from research areas other than Psychology. Additionally, a new metric, the Score Factor, is proposed as a useful alternative metric to assess a journal’s impact in the online media.

Mental health and the media: a comparative case study in open justice

ABSTRACTMedia reportage about forensic mental health cases raises several competing rights and interests, including the public interest in open justice; a patient’s right to privacy, treatment and recovery; the public’s right to know about mental health tribunal processes; and victims’ and citizens’ interests in learning the longer term consequences of a publicised serious unlawful act. This article details a case study of successful applications for permission to identify a forensic mental health patient in both a radio documentary and in research blogs and scholarly works in Australia. It compares the authors’ experience in this case with three other cases in Australia and the UK, and identifies and weighs the competing policy issues and principles courts or tribunals consider when attempting to balance open justice with the rights and interests of a range of stakeholders in forensic mental health cases where the news media and/or patients are seeking publicity and/or identification.

The case for developing an online intervention to support midwives in work-related psychological distress

Background: Midwives experience episodes of work-related psychological distress owing to the emotionally difficult and traumatic work environments they endure. There is a need to develop interventions to effectively support midwives, as the wellbeing of midwives can be directly correlated with the quality and safety of maternity care. Aims: This project aims to make the case for the development of an online support intervention, designed to effectively support midwives in distress. Methods: Literature reviews were conducted, and midwives and other subject experts were recruited to participate in a Delphi study via a research blog. Findings: Following literature reviews and a structured consultation with 66 participants, it was found that the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives with work-related psychological distress should prioritise confidentiality and anonymity, along with 24-hour mobile access and a range of other components. Conclusions: This research makes the case for the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives in work-related psychological distress. The author invites all midwives to support and follow ongoing research in this area via The Academic Midwife page on Facebook.

How to refer to people with disease in research outputs: The disconnection between academic practise and that preferred by people with multiple sclerosis

BackgroundIncreasingly, Government and Charity funders require public engagement in research. Invariably these research outputs describe the condition of someone with the disease of interest. We therefore sought to identify the preferred descriptor of someone with a disease, such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and to determine what descriptors are currently used by academics. MethodsSeveral surveys were undertaken: one from the Research Network of the MS Society (MSSRN), a major MS Charity within the United Kingdom, who are involved in reviewing grant applications, priority setting and research governance (n=146), and surveys from both the United Kingdom MS register (MSR; n=1713) and the North American Research Committee on Multiple Sclerosis (NARCOMS) registry (n=518). People were asked to rate descriptors of someone affected with MS. These were compared to that used by academic experimenters in basic science and clinical science research papers. ResultsAlthough the frequency of responses varied between surveys the overall findings showed many consistencies. This included use of person/people with MS (pwMS) as the preferred descriptor for someone with MS for social media and scientific publications. This was the preferred choice in about 55–60% people from the MRS and in over 70% in the NARCOMS and the MSSRN, respectively. Although MSer was the second preferred–choice for use in social media, there was as a large range of preferences from the ‘most-preferred’ to the ‘most-disliked.’ This reflected an earlier survey by UK-based research blogs using the term MSer (n=173). In contrast, pwMS had few ‘dislikes’ and results were skewed towards the ‘liked’ and ‘most-preferred’ choices. Client and sufferer were generally disliked terms, although there was some regional variation in levels of choice. Patient was generally seen as a neutral term that was neither strongly liked nor disliked. However, patient gained more public support for use within scientific publications (~20–25%) compared to social media (~10–15%). This descriptor was however most commonly used (98–99%) within both pre-clinical (searched in 6-month output of preclinical autoimmune MS models; n=161) and in clinical publications (specialist MS journals; n=220), whereas pwMS was not reported in over 75% of papers published in some specialised MS journals, and did not appear in the pre-clinical animal studies examined. ConclusionThere is a clear disconnection between preferences by individuals living with MS and current academic practise. As pwMS are increasingly reading primary research publications and are involved in patient and public involvement in research and grant review activities, the sensitivities of lay readers should be considered when writing research outputs. This issue may affect other diseases and a change in writing style could be adopted to show that we respect the wishes of the people that we study and wish to help.

Open-access writing: An investigation into the online drafting and revision of a research article in pure mathematics

ESP research has provided an account of research articles (RAs) across disciplines using both text-analytical methods and ethnographically-oriented approaches. This study explores what additional insights are gained into the genre from the study of a collaboratively produced RA in pure mathematics, negotiated via an open-access research blog. The data consists of 659 thread comments posted by blog participants as they engage with the research and writing up process. Facets of research-based writing that preoccupy the blog participants are revealed, as well as how decisions pertaining to genre and dissemination outlets are made. In addition, blog posts point to how the RA is adjusted to cater for the more diverse readership that open-access knowledge dissemination may entail. The findings provide support for results of existing genre analyses of RAs in pure mathematics, and offer new insights into writing for publication practices in the discipline. Potential pedagogical applications of the findings are proposed.

Zones of silence: Forensic patients, radio documentary, and a mindful approach to journalism ethics

This article explains a collaborative and critically reflective journalism research project stemming from the wish of an incarcerated forensic mental health patient to be named in public communication about his case. The authors are academics and journalists who embarked upon a combination of journalism, legal processes and academic research to win the right to name Patient A in a radio documentary and in academic works—including this journal article and research blogs. As a case study, it explains the theoretical and ethical considerations informing the journalism and the academic research, drawing upon traditions of documentary production, the principle of open justice and the ethical framework of ‘mindful journalism’. It concludes by drawing lessons from the project that might inform future practitioners and researchers embarking upon works of journalism and research involving vulnerable people and a competing set of rights and public interests.

How is research blogged? A content analysis approach

Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of peer‐reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to gain insight into bloggers' motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010 to 2012 in Researchblogging.org's health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with 10 major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self‐cite and that the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with more than one quarter providing health‐related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider, nonacademic audience. Nevertheless, almost 30% of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed.

The Making of FQ, or How to Pick up Pellets of Information in the Clouds of Fantasy

In an attempt to look at how content could be developed in dialogue with the use of visual documentary material, this article traces key ideas and references that were important to the making of an animation “FQ”. A research blog, personal notes and references are used to reflect on the work. The animation was based on historical portraits of the Norwegian political pioneer, Fredrikke Marie Qvam (1843-1938), and created for outdoor screening in the main square in her home town. Research and documentary material formed a base for an animation that was conceptually inspired by photo theories from diverse sources as well as feminist film theories of the gaze. In the process, imagination and fantasy plays into the treatment of the documentary material while the local viewing situation anchors the work in a biographical context.

Alternative metrics for measuring the quality of articles and journals.

Alternative metrics for measuring the quality of articles and journals.

Research blogging: indexing and registering the change in science 2.0.

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.