Scientists write blogs for a variety of reasons. But these do probably not include getting tenure (or grants). For that one has to publish.

Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

Scientists write blogs for a variety of reasons. But these do probably
**not** include getting tenure (or grants). For that one has to
**publish**. And I will argue here that a blog is not currently accepted
as a scientific publication (for more discussion on this point, see
[this article by Maureen Pennock and Richard
Davis](http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/pennockm_archivepress_ipres09_1.pdf){target="_blank"}).
For chemists, publication means in a relatively small number of
**high-impact** journals. Anything more than five articles a year in
such journals, and your tenure is (probably) secure (if not your
funding).

Can one do both? Post a blog item, and then publish a follow-up in a
high-impact journal? Well, yes and no.

I had better explain. A blog post is more often then not catalysed by
reading an article, viewing another blog, or discussing something with a
colleague. One posts in the hope of getting some feedback, from which
one's ideas might mature, develop, or indeed collapse! Scientists have
long done this of course, albeit with a colleague down the corridor, at
conferences or seminars. The ideas thus cast forth may also of course
also get stolen, and so these traditional mechanisms for floating ideas
are often very short on detail. Sometimes, returning to the idea of
blogs, one post can lead to another, and the nature of the blog means
the ideas can evolve, mutate very rapidly. Eventually, one might wish to
take a good overview of all the various efforts. At this point, one is
now considering publishing a journal article, since currently at least,
the longevity of a journal is considered longer than that of a blog (see
[this post
here](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=1459){target="_blank"} for
more ruminations on that theme). There are other good reasons for then
choosing a journal rather than one's blog. The QA (quality assurance)
necessary to get an article accepted in a good journal is, let's face
it, rather greater than that of a blog (although to be fair, it is only
motivation that limits the quality of the latter). Apart from adding all
those control experiments/calculations that may be missing from the
blog, one also must be far more fastidious in citing the literature
correctly.

I do speak from (thus far one) experience. The story starts
[here](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=783){target="_blank"}, this
being the initial post on a story that broke on Steve [Bachrach's
blog](http://comporgchem.com/blog/?p=385){target="_blank"} about a
compound with a potentially pentavalent carbon; Steve's own post was
based on an [original
article](http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200902125){target="_blank"} on
the theme. Several more blog posts followed as the logical theme
gradually developed. I eventually decided that telling how this set of
logical connections came about was almost as interesting as the specific
molecules it covered. The story had also evolved from discussing the
element **Astatine** to speculating about the rare gas **Helium**, a
somewhat less than obvious connection path (and how to discover
connections between disparate and apparently unconnected concepts is a
different story). Where should the story about how astatine was
connected to helium be told? I decided it should indeed be in a formally
published journal article. But it was also important to tell the story
more or less as it happened, and particularly to include the role that
the blogs themselves had played.

In fact, as soon as I started this undertaking, I realised that more
calculations, and at a rather higher theoretical level, needed to be
done in order to persuade the referees of the article that the science
was sound, and also that it advanced our knowledge significantly. In the
event, although the calculations were repeated, enhanced, or evolved in
some manner or other, and new ideas injected, none of the original
assertions was proven wrong (and of course its now not just me that
thinks this, but the  2-3 referees who also commented). Ultimately, I
would estimate I ended up spending perhaps ten times as much time on the
journal article as on the sum of the initial blog posts on the topic. It
an interesting question as to whether the motivation needed to put in
this amount of care and attention could also have been generated with
blog as the sole output medium (see my opening remarks).

The article is now published (DOI:
[10.1038/nchem.596](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.596){target="_blank"}).
Of course, you can only read it if your institution (or you personally)
has a subscription to the journal (although, like this blog, the article
can be located using public search facilities such as Google Scholar).
There is another aspect of both the blog and the article worth mention.
Both contain data. The blogs contain the molecular coordinates of all
the molecules discussed, as well as the DOIs for the digital repository
where the calculations are archived. So does the article, in the form of
an [interactive
table](http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/media/nchem.596_jmol.html){target="_blank"},
although again access to this table may or may not require a journal
subscription (in this regard I note that whereas an earlier article I
wrote for this publisher, see DOI
[10.1038/nchem.373](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.373), is protected
from non-subscribers, the [interactive
table](http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v1/n7/media/nchem.373_jmol.html){target="_blank"}
which is part of the article is openly accessible. The journal deserves
full credit for allowing this data to be on public access).

There is another aspect of the blog and the article, which was alluded
to above. I introduced the theme of linking concepts together. This very
blog post (and all the others) have been subjected to analysis using the
[calais archive
tagger](http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-calais-archive-tagger/){target="_blank"}.
This automatically determines appropriate tags to annotate each post
with, and then declares them using standard methods (which include RDF).
The published article is similarly tagged by the publisher. In theory at
least, this collection of materials, the blogs and their tags,  and the
article and indeed commentaries about both, should be reconcilable using
appropriate semantic searches. But at this point, I feel that this topic
deserves separate attention and I will close here.

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


Scientists write blogs for a variety of reasons.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

To blog or to publish. That is the question.