A quiet revolution is taking place in the way the primary research literature gets reviewed. Like all revolutions in their infancy, this one looks hungry, raggedy and generally not respectable. But that could change rather quickly given the right technology.

Research Blogging is a brand new service that aggregates commentary about the peer-reviewed literature appearing on blogs.

Let's say Mary the Chemist finds a procedure in a paper on reductive amination that solves a problem she's been having in isolating her products. After having used the procedure awhile, she notices that one class of substrate not described in the original paper gives much lower yields than those reported. Not having the resources to create a complete paper around her observation, she decides to write about what she found and post it to her blog.

If that were the end of the story, it's very unlikely Mary's posting would be of much use. Although Mary's blog is read by a couple of hundred people daily, few of the readers on the day her posting appeared had an interest in reductive amination or the paper she discussed. And none of her readers on that day were able to follow up on her observation.

Mary continues to post to her blog and eventually her observation, of potentially great value to the right chemist, gets buried in the archives (and on page 3 or 4 of most Google searches).

Enter Research Blogging, a Web-based database associating blog entries with references to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Some time before writing about her observations, Mary signed up for a Research Blogging account and registered her blog with the service. At the time she wrote her observations on the reductive amination reaction, Mary applied special markup to the posting to make it readable by Research Blogging's automated system.

Instead of disappearing into the digital abyss, Mary's observation becomes permanently associated with the original paper.

Although Research Blogging's user interface is currently primitive, it's unlikely to remain so for long. The founders of the service appear both motivated and committed, recently forming a non-profit corporation to support their work.

In the future it's not inconceivable that Barry the Chemist, after having finished doing his CAS search on reductive amination methods would next turn to Research Blogging to make sure he really knows everything written about the three most promising peer-reviewed papers he's considering using.

Research Blogging is a wonderful idea with great potential to fill a significant need. Like any new technology, though, there are some issues to work out. The next article in this series will offer some ideas.

You can find them in nearly every scientific discipline: the anonymous science blog. For a variety of reasons, their authors have decided not to reveal their identities, as is their right. Styles range from the absolutely analytical to the cynically sarcastic.

I have nothing against anonymous science blogs. Some of the most interesting writing I've seen has been posted to them. But I do have some reasons why you might want to think twice before starting one.

1. If you're writing about anything remotely interesting, you will be identified sooner or later. Have you ever attended a scientific meeting and noticed how many perfect strangers you meet who know someone you know? Scientific disciplines are very small worlds. Not only that, but Google is a frighteningly powerful tool to find obscure information. If one of your colleagues stumbles onto your blog, chances are excellent they will be able to identify you if they're determined.

2. Owning your content keeps you sane. Have you ever noticed how otherwise considerate people can be very inconsiderate drivers? There's something about anonymity that brings out the worst in people. Connecting your name with what you write forces you to carefully consider what you're doing. And that's a good thing. You're going to be identified anyway (see above), so you might as well write like it from the start.

3. Consider your motive. What's the real reason you're writing under a pseudonym? Is it to be able to vent without consequence? To avoid upsetting your boss? Wanting to avoid colleague reactions or embarrassment? Uncertainty as to whether you're "allowed?" Do you worry about writing something that a future employer might not like, thus endangering you chances of getting a job? Going back to Point 1 above, you will be identified eventually. When that happens, will you be prepared to face the music?

4. Your current employer has rights. If you're working in industry, you've signed an agreement that gives your employer rights to your ideas and inventions. If you're in academics, your advisor probably doesn't want you disclosing the details of cutting-edge research. The immediacy and reach of blogging will turn scientific publication on its head; these are merely previews of the issues that lie ahead. When in doubt, ask before blogging.

5. It's a new form of scientific publication. Would you want to be an anonymous author on your scientific publications? Of course not. Every scientist is a businessperson, whether they like the idea or not. The business model is simple: trade your scientific reputation for money in the form of grants, salaries, bonuses, and job opportunities. Publication is the currency of scientific business. Blog-like scientific writing is simply its newest incarnation.

Own your content. The career you help (or save) may be your own.

image credit: flyzipper

Depth-First began with a single post on August 12th, 2006. One year and 193 posts later, I thought it would be interesting to reflect back on how my expectations about blogging diverged from reality. Many of my observations come from statistics compiled by Google Analytics. An investment in time to install and use analytics software more than pays for itself within a few weeks.

With these thoughts in mind, here are ten things that surprised me:

1. The Undiscovered Continent of "Gray Literature." Like television networks, scientific journals serve subscribers with often wildly differing interests from yours. Some content will simply never make it into a print journal, no matter how useful or newsworthy. When you publish a blog, the only OK you need is your own. This means you can tackle subjects that are literally impossible for scientific journals to cover. In fact, your blog can contain valuable content not available anywhere else. After you wrap your brain around this simple concept, the most interesting things can start to happen.

2. It takes about six months of constant writing to see signs of being noticed. This is the phase during which I suspect many bloggers throw in the towel. Unless you already enjoy world renown in your field (in which case you're probably not blogging), expect to pay your six month dues.

3. Syndication matters. A lot. When I started D-F, I couldn't understand why people seemed so excited about "syndication." But I did notice a steady build-up of traffic on my server logs dedicated solely to accessing my RSS and Atom feeds. I decided to track this traffic using FeedBurner and discovered, to my amazement, that it accounted for about a third of all non-robot traffic on my site.

4. Readers take the weekend off. Traffic drops off rather significantly (50-60%) on weekends. Conversely, traffic peaks quite consistently on Wednesdays. Although the former is understandable, the latter continues to puzzle me.

5. For niche subjects, AdSense sucks. Chemistry is a subject dominated by niches. Any recent ACS program will show 40+ divisions; chemistry is all about the long tail. In the early days of D-F, I experimented with AdSense and got nada. This made sense (pun intended) because the ads being shown had almost nothing to do with what I was writing about. Adwords can work very well for broadly-appealing subjects. But if you're writing about your area of scientific expertise, which by definition is about as niche as you can get, AdSense is more likely to be an eyesore than a source of income.

6. Your most valuable asset: the archive. On a typical day, only about 15% of D-F's pageviews come from a user landing on the homepage itself. The rest come from pages previously found and linked to from other sources, bookmarks, or from search engines. When seen from this perspective, (which is hard to grasp when your archive contains ten articles) it becomes very important to maintain access to the archives and ensure that links can always be followed. On two occasions I've nearly hosed my database, but my backups saved the day. Never assume your archive of articles and comments will be there tomorrow.

7. You never know who's reading. The vast majority of readers never post a comment or write an email. I should have expected this, since the vast majority of blogs I read never get a comment or email from me. On the other hand, I've met a few very intelligent and friendly people online as a direct result of one or more D-F articles, which is the ultimate reward.

8. Writing begets more writing. Forcing yourself to write regularly about a subject you know about is very therapeutic. More importantly, being forced to back up your arguments in writing on a regular basis makes you examine your own assumptions more carefully. Most important of all, writing regularly brings new ideas into view that you would have missed otherwise.

9. Forget about getting Dugg, try to get StumbledUpon instead. Being a regular reader of Digg, I was well aware of its massive audience and the surge in traffic that follows a site being featured on the Digg home page. The effect usually lasts a couple of days. But the traffic surge produced from a listing in StumbleUpon, continues unabated for weeks, and results in permanently higher overall page views.

10. Robots everywhere. Google Analytics doesn't record activity from robots and web spiders. But my server log reveals a staggering amount of traffic due to non-human visitors. The software interacting with my site is doing everything from indexing it for Google to trying to post annoying ringtone spam comments. Still, the benefit of automated user agents more than outweighs the inconvenience. Make sure your robots.txt file allows any and all user agents.

Image Credit: Seether_Alpha

You know something's gone mainstream when chemistry's flagship magazine, Chemical & Engineering News, recommends it. The current issue contains an article offering five tips for a better job search. And right there at number three is "Connect through blogging."

What specifically should job-seekers be doing with their blogs? The article suggests:

• writing short summaries of your presentations at meetings

• inviting comments to create an interactive environment

• posting fresh content regularly

("Writing summaries of your most recent publications" is not one of the suggestions. Perhaps certain unpleasant copyright issues are best avoided altogether).

I could be dead wrong about this, but the day may well come when not having a professional online presence outside of standard publications will be a competitive disadvantage to chemists. Regardless of whether you're still an undergrad or in your third decade in industry, blogging does something for you as a candidate that is impossible to achieve by other means.

Let me explain.

I've interviewed numerous job candidates, but I find it very difficult to do. No matter how good a company is at pre-screening and structuring the on-site interview, and no matter how skilled the interviewers, the process is fundamentally flawed. Here are some of the things I always looked for but was rarely able to fully address during an interview:

• How passionate is the candidate about their field? Clock-punchers have a tendency to stay in an organization for a long time.

• How does the candidate deal with criticism? The better the working environment, the more likely it is the candidate will be exposed frequently to one form of scientific criticism or another. Dealing with it is not always easy, especially when money and promotions are involved.

• How does the candidate work with potential competitors? Most academic programs in chemistry do very little to prepare chemists for the reality they face in flat, efficient organizations oriented around teams of equivalently-trained peers.

• Can the candidate generate enough new ideas to sustain themselves and anyone who might work with them? A chemist who runs out of good ideas quickly, or who doesn't dig deeply enough when the project is failing will have a very hard time thriving professionally.

• How does the candidate try to persuade others? Persuasion plays a deciding role in getting things done within organizations. Integrity, humility, and tact are incredibly powerful persuasive tools that are only taught by the very best mentors and professors.

• How willing is the candidate to stand against established dogma? Dogma kills innovation. But going against dogma is often very unpleasant, especially for the person doing it. People with the skill and courage to challenge orthodoxy while keeping their cool are worth every penny they earn.

Sadly, no matter what you ask a candidate, you will rarely get good answers to questions like these. For one thing, interviewing is very stressful for candidates, and as surprising as it might sound - it can be equally so for interviewers. For better or worse, what you see during an interview may not be what you would get in a colleague. Another factor is the interview schedule itself and its dampening effect on in-depth discussions.

Blogging, on the other hand, has the unique potential to give insights into all of these questions.

How many blogs do you read by authors you respect but whom you've never met? How many of those blogs offer insight into one or more of the questions listed above? If one of these respected authors were interviewing at your company or university, how would your expectations differ from a candidate you knew less about? How would the quality of the interview differ?

Of course, the effect works in the opposite direction as well. We're just starting to come to grips with the idea that it's literally possible for ordinary people to reach a world-wide audience for virtually zero cost with content that stays around for a long time. The concept is simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

The payoffs can be large for those willing to take the risk, stay creative, focus, and persevere. Which, of course, are exactly the kinds of talents your next employer may be looking for.

Image Credit: blakie