Friday 8 May 2015

» 38 reasons why you should blog about your research The Sociological Imagination

 Source: http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/13910

38 reasons why you should blog about your research

  1. It helps you become more clear about your ideas.
  2. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience.
  3. It increases your visibility within academia.
  4. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you.
  5. It increases your visibility more than a static site and allows
    people who find you to get an overall sense of your academic interests.
  6. It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
  7. It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
  8. It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
  9. Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing
    part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and
    anxiety.
  10. Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
  11. It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought
    which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some
    point in the future.
  12. It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work,
    drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary
    into shared categories.
  13. It allows you to procrastinate for a further 10 to 20 minutes before going back to NVivo in a useful(ish) way.
  14. It helps you build a community around your ideas and interests – Kath McNiff
  15. It allows you to start a conversation that other researchers can join using comments – Kath McNiff
  16. It’s a tremendous way to access additional relevant information/sources through the connections you make – @drdjwalker
  17. It can also be a great way to increase your sample size by crowd
    sourcing contributions and through public scrutiny help prepare you for
    the peer review process when the time comes to publish your work
    – @drdjwalker
  18. It’s a great way to get international and cross-disciplinary input and reflections on your research – @jess1ecat
  19. It’s a fabulous way to give back to the research community by
    providing links and resources for other researchers, give and you shall
    receive – @jess1ecat
  20. Reciprocity through blogging and Twitter shares builds your profile
    but importantly forges lasting connections to fellow researchers
    – @jess1ecat
  21. It allows you to publish ideas immediately without waiting two years
    while things go through peer review and more peer review and wait in a
    publishing queue – @CelebYouthUK
  22. It’s fun – @CelebYouthUK
  23. It’s a faster way to get your research findings out. Journal/book
    publishing and the peer-review/editing process can take FOREVER
    – @ajlusc
  24. Because C Wright Mills would have probably been a blogger. If not, he would at the very least have been a fan – @ajlusc
  25. It is an exercise in disciplined writing. Stuff that doesn’t get
    used in the bigger thesis project, published papers, and the like, can
    be glossed for a blog and thrown out for ‘collision’ with others’ ideas.
    That’s how better ideas get formulated – Ibrar
  26. It makes you a better writer – @drfigtree
  27. It allows raw uncensored ideas to be creatively expressed before stymied by a prolonged peer review process – @DrBenKoh
  28. It allows research findings to be put out there in a format that
    participants can access, and are actually likely to read – Matthew
    Hanchard
  29. You have control of the publishing process – @DrHelenKara
  30. It’s a way to publish information about all aspects of research
    which formal publishing methods won’t accept, whether because it’s too
    short, too partial, too controversial, or for some other reason –
    @DrHelenKara
  31. Keeping your own blog can be a daunting prospect, but that’s not the
    only way: many bloggers are more than happy to accept a ‘guest’ blog on
    a subject which would be of interest to their readers – @DrHelenKara
  32. It helps to be up-to-date with new findings in your discipline, and often with findings in other fields – @udadisisuperior
  33. It’s a means to be FOUND. People google those words and ta-da! – @everythingabili
  34. It forces you to think of your ideas in simple language that can be
    easily articulated. It’s communication practice. – @everythingabili
  35. You will have MORE IDEAS – GUARANTEED. The process of blogging
    almost always sparks off more ideas. How could it not?
    – @everythingabili
  36. No need to study in isolation if you are a distance learning
    student, blogging is one way to network, share ideas and your studies
    with fellow students around the world – Lucy Bodenham
  37. Over time, a blog has helped me to develop more jargon-free and even
    poetic writing. I have returned to academic publication with a better
    language with which to express myself – Kip jones
  38. Blogging helps keep your profile out there if you are experiencing a gap between publications – Jeff Craig
Any suggestions for more reasons? Put them in the comments box and
I’ll add them to the list & note who they came from. If you’re on
Twitter please include your twitter handle.



» 38 reasons why you should blog about your research The Sociological Imagination

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