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Every enthusiastic scientist knows that once you reach a certain level of specialization, there are very few people in your immediate surroundings that actually understand what you say. Eyes of family and friends get a bit glassy when you tell them about the SIR2 homologs, and nobody wants to look at your C. elegans' baby pictures. Luckily, this day and age there's no need to wait until the next conference to talk about your research, because you can blog all about it.
Last post we talked about self-citation in scientific literature. This time, we're going to talk about self-citation in science blogs, because I've done some research about the subject and want to share. I apologize in advance for repeating things known to those who've read my previous posts.
Does blog self-citing promote your interests?
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Could be. Melissa Terras, who has a blog and over 2,000 Twitter followers noticed that each time she blogged and tweeted about one of her past referee articles (they are freely available in her university repository) the download numbers went up. She decided to try and blog about three articles from the same project, but not blog about a forth. The result: the promoted articles received at least 11 times more downloads than the un-promoted one. However, Terras has a strong Web presence, so this might not work for any blogger.
Now for my research:
The Sample
In our previous research we (Judit Bar-Ilan, Mike Thelwall and I) chose non-commercial blogs with 1-2 authors, which had at least 20 posts in RB. This time, we went by RB categories. We chose four RB categories: Ecology/Conservation, Computer Science/Engineering, Mathematics and Philosophy. Since the Mathematics category was the smallest, we studied it all (until April 30, 2012), but the other categories were sampled between January 1, 2010 and April 30, 2012. Only bloggers who used their real name and posts which were signed by them became part of the study, for obvious reasons. Figure 1 is an example for a self-citing post. In ResearchBlogging.Org posts can belong to several categories, so sometimes one post, like the one in the figure, was counted several times in the study.
The Results
The table shows the number of overall bloggers and self-citers and their percentage in each category. Computer Science/Engineering has the biggest number and the highest percentage of self-citers. The Mathematics category has the lowest number and percentage of self-citers. Only the difference between Computer Science/Engineering and Mathematics was statistically significant (p < 0.05). We had 45 self-citers in absolute numbers.
Table: Bloggers and self-citers in the four categories
| Category | Bloggers | Self-citers |
| Ecology/Conservation | 132 | 17(13%) |
| Computer Science/Engineering | 93 | 19(20%) |
| Philosophy | 64 | 11(17%) |
| Mathematics | 89 | 8(9%) |
Education
Most (80%) of the self-citers have a PhD. In peer-reviewed self-citing, more productive and/or older scientists tend to self-cite more, simply because they have more to cite. This seems to apply for blogs as well. The scientist who has been doing research for a decade would have more to cite than the first-year graduate student. 82% of the self-citers were affiliated with a university or a research institute, in comparison with 59% in the previous research. Though I couldn't get exact data (because some people wrote "researcher" or "lecturer" instead of their actual academic rank) I got the impression most self-citers were postdocs. That's quite a change from last time, where 32% were PhDs, and 27% graduate students.
Woman, cite thyself
When it comes to science blogging, women are still a minority. Our previous research found that only 22% of the blogs were authored or co-authored by women. But the the results were even lower for self-citing. Out of the 45 self-citers, only six were women. Women cited statistically significantly less than men in Ecology and Computer Science. Even when women have science blogs (or write in a group blog) they talk less about their own research and so promote themselves less than men do.
Why do bloggers self-cite?
We know that scientists cite themselves because of a mixture of an honest need to build upon their previous research and the need to self-advertise themselves and their other articles. However, a blogger can blog forever without self-citing. So why do bloggers self-cite?
We still haven't done a full-scale content analysis (though we might, now that our peer-reviewer recommended it) but here are some nice quotes from the sample:
“I am a coauthor on a new paper in PLoS Computational Biology I thought I would promote here.” Jonathan Eisen, Tree of Life
“What did my work show? Deep-sea nematodes have a complex evolutionary history…” Holly Bik, Deep Sea New
“Yay! First paper of my postdoc is out in the August 2011 issue of Global Change Biology! Woohoo! So, what have I been doing for the past few years of my life? In brief summary: Kelp. Food webs. Climate change. A potent combination.” Jeremy Yoder, I'm a chordata! urochordata!
The element of self-promotion definitely exists, but mostly it's "My research is awesome; let me tell you all about it!” Blogs are an excellent way for scientists to share their work with the public without hyping press releases and without their work having anything to do with chocolate or aliens (though it might!).
And yes, I know I self-cited myself in a blog post about self-citing of bloggers in blog posts, thank you very much.
Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Self- Citation of Bloggers in the Science Blogosphere To be presented at COSCI12, Dusseldorf, August 1-5.
Shema H, Bar-Ilan J, & Thelwall M (2012). Research blogs and the discussion of scholarly information. PloS one, 7 (5) PMID: 22606239