January 14, 2008
Blogs Are Increasingly Venues for Scholarship, Librarians Are Told
For those who are skeptical that blogs can really change the face of publishing and scholarship, consider the case of Reed A. Cartwright. A postdoctoral geneticist at the University of Georgia, Mr. Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005.
Six months later a plant geneticist at the University California at Davis contacted Mr. Cartwright after reading his post. The California researcher said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis offered by Mr. Cartwright, and that he was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. The plant geneticist said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.
A group of librarians at the American Library Association midwinter conference heard that story Saturday from Andre Brown, a doctoral student in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Brown wanted to impress on the librarians that blogs are increasingly being used by scientific researchers for sharing of ideas and developing new ones. Mr. Brown himself helps run a blog for biophysicists. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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In the 1980s and 1990s artificial intelligence programmers traipsed around the world building what was called somewhat optimistically “expert systems”. In the course of doing part of that work—protocol analysis—involving getting articulated what was “on the mind” of experts while handling certain types of cases—these programmers frequently noted (some of these noticings later published) that lots of rumination and exploration of lines of thought went on before insights and decision took place. Some of these rumination processes occupied weeks, some days, some months, and in one published case, 21 years. Some such rumination processes turned on a switch, it seemed, at times, opening the rumination itself to outside influences, turning individual rumination into collective group rumination. Letters, non-article publishings, conference presentations, hallway conversations, and the like were the media in which these ruminations took place.
Blogs are privately published publicly available such ruminations—and if we measure their impact—they open up for diversity and collaborative enhancement early stages of thought hithertofore much more laboriously and slowly opened to much lesser degrees to thought. Now global audiences can diversify greatly entirely local blog publishings of ruminations. This is a great step for humankind, overall, in this way.
— Richard Tabor Greene Jan 14, 05:45 AM #
A bit of a correction: I was a graduate student in genetics at the University of Georgia when paper happened.
I have since earned my doctorate and am now a postdoctoral research associate in genetics/bioinformatics at North Carolina State University.
— Reed A. Cartwright Jan 14, 07:44 PM #
There are many avenues for teaching and learning. Academic publishing in national refereed journals contributes to moving the profession forward to new levels.
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
NATIONAL FORUM JOURNALS
www.nationalforum.com
— William Allan Kritsonis, PhD Jan 14, 08:16 PM #