Happy Anniversary AgEco Blog

Twenty-five years ago I was doing a brisk business running workshops to teach middle management how to use email. They were sceptical. It’s a waste of time they said. Nobody I know uses email. I have a fax machine. I have a secretary. It’s a fad. I don’t have time for every new-fangled technology that comes along they said. Now one of the most common objections to using social media is, “I have email”.

Photo: Marsmettnn Tallahassee on Flickr.

Our AgEco blog is a year old. Many people are quite vocal in expressing their views that this or any blog has little value and is of no interest to them. It’s a waste of time they say. Nobody I know uses social media. I don’t have time for this nonesense. Perhaps it’s not the “coffee break" online we described in an earlier post, but the numbers do tell us there seems to be some interest

• 125 posts on topics ranging from individual reflections on workshops people attended to reviews of books and papers to essays on issues of concern to the research community
• 400+ comments from people all over the world
• 66,000 page views
• 25,300 unique visitors

The story the numbers tell is that some people are reading and responding to our posts and for those people there is obviously some value in doing so. What might that value be?

People in knowledge professions like research survive and prosper on the strength of their writing. ‘Good’ writers get published and then get invited to make presentations and keynote addresses and sit on panels. They get research grants and are offered interesting well paid positions with international agencies and prestigious universities.

What makes a writer ‘good’ is not their mastery of grammar and vocabulary but their transition from the ‘knowledge telling’ stage of writing to the ‘knowledge transformation’ stage. As Ronald Kellogg describes it in The Psychology of Writing, “By writing about a subject one learns what one thinks about the subject...the writer’s knowledge of the topic is transformed as a consequence of having converted private thoughts into a public symbol system”. Or as E.M. Forester put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” What better test ground for your ideas than our blog. Even if you get no comments, which is the norm, you benefit from the exercise of “converting private thoughts into a public symbol system’ and thereby transform your own thinking. This is especially relevant for ‘young’ researchers (i.e. researchers in the early stages of their career).

The problem for young researchers is not the number of papers you publish, it’s obscurity. Canadian science fiction writer Cory Doctorow puts all his work on the web for free. When asked how he expects to earn a living as a writer by essentially giving his books away, he replies, “Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it.”

In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals were cited in the period 2002 to 2006. That’s less than half and that’s only for the top journals.

With literally thousands of papers to choose from on any given topic, who will you read and cite? Most likely the first paper you can find that’s relevant. Increasingly that will by authors who learn to use social media to make their work known within and beyond their immediate research community.

Probably the best evidence we have for how a social media can increase peoples’ awareness of your work is the campaign we did for Diana Suhardiman and Mark Giordano’s ‘scalar disconnect’ article. Carefully aligning a WLE blog review with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook promotions and arranging with the publisher to allow downloads resulted in an increase from zero to 944 views of the article (700 in the first three weeks). The chances of that paper being cited sooner and more often are greatly increased.

In much less than twenty-five years from now I expect researchers will as a matter of routine embed their publications in far more sophisticated social media campaigns. It used to be “publish or perish”. Now I think it’s “blog or die”. These are early days, but our bloggers have a head start.

Happy Anniversary.