Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016
Blogging at scientific conferences
Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski
One of the biggest resources for news on the latest scientific discoveries is the scientific conference. Many of these conferences have become more open to sharing their results with science bloggers. How should you cover these conferences? What are the dos and don’ts? In this chapter, Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders share their experiences with blogging scientific conferences.
Academic conferences are a key conduit of information between scientific researchers. At conferences, hundreds or even thousands of researchers may gather in one location to share the latest research findings and insights on a given topic. While that may seem like a lot of people, it’s easily overshadowed by the total number of individuals who may be interested in the information discussed, but who couldn’t attend the conference in person—including nonattending researchers in that field, researchers from related fields, and laypeople with an interest in the topic. The largest conferences put out press releases of the most exciting research presented. Eager reporters covering the science beat might also make their way to a select session or two and report on the findings in a local paper or online. But by and large, the science that is presented at conferences stays at conferences.
Fortunately, this situation presents a fantastic opportunity for science bloggers who happen to be attending these conferences. One of the toughest things about writing a science blog is regularly coming up with timely content that has not already been discussed elsewhere. Conferences can serve up fresh and largely exclusive content for days on end. In addition, your blogging efforts can increase the exposure given to important research presented at the conference, or even the conference itself. This is a win-win-win for you, your colleagues, and the organization holding the conference. In this chapter we outline a variety of approaches to using blogs and social media during a scientific conference, and give some practical advice to help make your conference blogging a positive and worthwhile experience.
What is conference blogging?
As far as we know the term “conference blogging” has never been strictly defined, and this seems like a good opportunity to do just that. Conference blogging refers to the use of any online media to share information from an academic conference or presentation with the rest of the world. This can be accomplished via a blog, a Tumblr, a Facebook page, a Twitter or LinkedIn account, a YouTube page, a podcast, or any combination of these. The point is to use social media to disseminate information beyond those physically present at a conference.
Before the conference
First and foremost, be sure to contact the conference organizers beforehand to notify them that you are interested in blogging about the conference. Some conference organizations may not be supportive of blogging, while others may have specific rules regarding how this should be done (that is, no photos or audio recordings of presentations). In either case, it is best to acquire this information before attending the conference. Otherwise you risk getting escorted from a conference session for inappropriate behavior. Good luck explaining that to your colleagues!
Assuming that blogging is permitted, you may actually be able to get some level of support from the conference organizers. We’ve found that the level of support provided can vary substantially between conferences. Presumably, the prominence of your online platform will at least partly determine the level of support provided, but so too can the financial health of the conference organization, or the organizers’ awareness and perception of social media. On the less impressive end of the spectrum you may be given access to free wifi, access to a media lounge (free donuts!), or early access to the conference program and abstracts. If you’re more established as an online science communicator, you may be listed as an “official conference blogger” on the conference website or program, or receive free registration. And finally, if you’re a blogosphere superstar, you could receive free travel and/or accommodations. The most important thing to remember is always to ask for support—it never hurts, and from our experience, conference organizers are generally open to providing some perks in exchange for the free publicity that blogging can provide.
Next, whenever possible, go through the conference program ahead of time and identify any key sessions that you think would be a good fit for your blog. This is also a good time to contact people whom you might want to interview during the conference. You will want to gauge whether these individuals are interested in discussing their work with you, and whether they’d prefer to do so in person or via email. If you’re lucky, you might even get a few interviews under your belt before the conference officially starts, saving you lots of time at the conference itself.
Finally, before heading to the conference, consider putting up a blog post to let people know how to get in touch with you while you’re there. You could also join or start an online pre-conference conversation with other attendees on Twitter. The easiest way to accomplish this is to begin using the official Twitter hashtag for the conference whenever discussing anything relevant. While most conferences today establish and widely advertise their official hashtags, you may still come across a small or digitally unsavvy conference without an official hashtag. In this case, do a quick search on Twitter to see if others in attendance have already started using an unofficial hashtag. If not, feel free to go out on a limb and make up your own (we suggest keeping it as short and distinctive as possible—the conference initials and year are a common method). Before you know it, the hashtag you invented may become the common link for all online conversation at the conference.
During the conference
In our experience, it is much easier to blog about a conference while you are actually there, rather than when you get back home. Once the conference ends you’ll quickly become too busy catching up on all that you missed while away to post much content. (Travis has several audio interviews from a conference two years ago that he still hasn’t gotten around to publishing.)
Keep in mind that blogging a conference can become overwhelming if you aim to produce more content than is reasonable. Make sure to set a realistic estimate of how much time you can devote each day to blogging, then stick to it as best as possible. Although everyone has a unique approach, a great strategy we’ve adopted is to dedicate a chunk of time during each day to post content. This ensures we’re not stuck blogging in the wee hours of the night and missing out on social events. For example, Travis has found that just thirty to sixty minutes each day provides enough time to post content, and can often be squeezed in between conference sessions. Since you can’t be everywhere at once, you can also ask other conference attendees to write guest posts about sessions that you did not attend. Whatever approach works best for you, just remember that blogging should supplement but not take over your entire conference experience.
As soon as you put up a blog post, send a brief note to anyone mentioned to alert them that the content is going live and to thank them for their contributions. People always appreciate this little courtesy. And because most of us are suckers for seeing our name in print or our face in a photo or video, the people mentioned in your post are likely to share the content with their friends, family, and colleagues, bringing new visitors to your site.
Finally, try and stay abreast of the online dialogue at the conference. You can set up a search for the conference’s Twitter hashtag to see what the other attendees are discussing online. This can become particularly useful when multiple attendees listening to the same presentation discuss the content presented in real time. Setting up a Google Alert (see http://www.google.com/alerts) for the conference can also help you find online coverage of the conference.
After the conference
Once the conference is over, take a look at your analytics to get an idea of how many people viewed your content through your different online platforms. Tweetreach (http://tweetreach.com) is a useful tool for tracking the number of tweets using a specific conference hashtag, and Google Analytics (https://www.google.com/analytics) is excellent for assessing traffic to your site. Be sure to pass all this information along to conference organizers and anyone whose work you featured during the conference. Conference organizers and researchers really appreciate this sort of quantitative information, and keeping them happy may lead to increased acceptance of social media in the conference setting—and more opportunities for you.
Essential tools for conference blogging
Before you set off to blog your first conference, it is essential to become comfortable with a number of tools that will make this possible. In terms of hardware, you will need at least one of the following items: (1) a compact laptop or netbook with good battery life, (2) a tablet, or (3) a smart phone. Now let’s take a look at some of the most common online tools for disseminating conference news, from least to most time consuming.
By far the simplest approach to conference blogging (technically, microblogging) is to simply tweet about interesting things that you’ve come across at a conference in 140 characters or less. Also, you can use Twitter to link to other content related to the conference, including your own or others’ blog posts, videos, slideshare presentations, and more.
Many organizations now explicitly encourage Twitter use by promoting conference-specific hashtags. By setting up a Twitter search for that hashtag you can easily follow and participate in the online discussion taking place among people at the conference. To see how this works in practice, go to Twitter and search for #AHKCSummit; the official hashtag of the 2014 Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Children. You will see links to newsworthy presentations, photos of posters that were presented at the conference, updates from conference staff on what is happening in each session at a given time, links to blog posts that give extra detail on topics that were discussed at the conference, and pictures from social events.1 Conferences like the Global Summit are a great example of the way that a professional gathering can use social media (and Twitter especially) to transcend its physical location—tweets using the hashtag begin to pop up well before the conference each year, and continue for months after people have gone home.
Live-tweeting a conference takes very little time or effort, which makes it an ideal way to begin conference blogging. Even if you tweet only infrequently, you can keep up with the latest happenings simply by following the conference hashtag online. This is especially useful at large conferences with multiple sessions occurring simultaneously. Twitter can also serve as a powerful networking tool while at a conference. If, like us, you are a tad socially awkward, it can be much easier to introduce yourself to another researcher in person if you’ve previously participated in some scientific repartee via Twitter. If you are looking for an easy way to get into conference blogging, then Twitter is a great place to start.
A useful tool that helps leverage the power of Twitter is Storify, which allows you to organize tweets on a specific topic (for example, by using a conference hashtag). Storify also allows you to insert your own commentary between tweets, and can be embedded into blog posts. For example, F1000 used Storify to present tweets from a session on science publishing at Experimental Biology 2013, then embedded that Storify within a blog post that provided additional information and context.2 This can be a great tool for providing people with an overview of a presentation using tweets from those in attendance, and for exposing/repurposing a Twitter conversation for a broader audience.
Photo sharing
People like pictures! Just look at the popularity of Instagram, and the volume of photos shared on Facebook. So if you are blogging or tweeting at a conference, make sure that you snap a few pictures to post online. Photos can supplement your other content and help to attract people to posts that they might otherwise skip, or they can stand alone. Either way, photos can be a great way to network with other attendees. A great example of this approach comes courtesy of Carin Bondar, who took pictures with nearly everyone attending the ScienceOnline conference in 2011. She then posted many of these pictures online with a tag identifying the other attendees. Taking and sharing photos is a wonderful way to introduce yourself to countless people, and to give a sense of what is happening at the conference to those following from afar.
Videos and podcasts
Given the ubiquity of cameras and voice recorders in smart phones, it couldn’t be simpler to record audio and video clips and publish them online while attending a conference. By live-streaming a presentation (which is possible using YouTube, UStream.tv, Justin.tv, Google+, and other tools), you can even allow people to watch a conference talk in real time. In fact, when combined with a Twitter hashtag, this approach can allow online viewers to pose questions to the presenters. Just be aware that many conferences have very specific rules regarding this type of activity—photos, and audio and video recordings, may be restricted during some sessions. Also, since information presented at a conference may not have been officially published, the presenter may not appreciate your posting photos of his or her slides on the web. Always ask the conference organizers as well as the individual presenters if they’re open to having you share their presented materials online.
Another simple way to create content is to conduct short interviews with other conference attendees. People almost always say yes to an interview, and a three- to four-minute video or audio recording can be uploaded to YouTube or a podcast hosting site such as Podomatic.com almost immediately.3 The speed of this approach is a major bonus for you as a conference attendee, because it allows you to disseminate content without taking much time away from your own conference activities. Video and audio are also extremely easy to share further, since people can embed videos and podcasts on their own blogs and Facebook pages. Embedding video and audio files in this way can help them to spread incredibly quickly.
Blog posts
The most obvious way to “blog” about a conference is through a traditional blog post. Blogging can take the form of interviews, descriptions of interesting presentations, or your thoughts on a controversy that erupted during the conference. Unless you’re a particularly expeditious writer, however, be aware that writing long-form blog posts can take a lot of time away from your conference experience.4 We have found that alternating moderate-length text-based posts with shorter video- or audio-based posts can be a very good way to publish a lot of content while at a conference without overwhelming yourself.
Beware the dreaded ingelfinger
The Ingelfinger rule is named after former New England Journal of Medicine editor Franz Ingelfinger, and states that a manuscript will not be accepted for publication in a journal if it has already been published somewhere else.5 Technically, this means that if you publish the results of a study on your blog, it may subsequently be rejected from publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This is obviously a concern for researchers. So although we have yet to hear of any instance of this rule being applied in practice, it may be best to proceed with caution when discussing results that have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (read: almost all original research presented at conferences).
It is critical to get permission from any researcher before discussing his or her original unpublished research on your blog, and especially before posting any images of posters, tables, or figures. Discussing research that has already been published, which is often the case in keynotes and plenary sessions, is much less of a concern. When reporting on unpublished data, you might want to leave out details (exact numbers, statistics, and so on), and stick to the general findings of the study. Of course, it is common for abstracts of conference presentations to be available online or to be published in a journal supplement—sometimes before the scheduled conference. In our opinion, the information in the abstract is therefore fair game for use in a blog post or other online discussion.
If you are also presenting at the conference, you may want to avoid discussing your own discoveries if they have yet to be published. As vice president and global editorial director at MedPage Today, Ivan Oransky, explained in an interview with the blog Scholarly Kitchen: “Ingelfinger . . . at least officially, doesn’t prohibit pre-publication publicity as long as researchers don’t court journalists’ attention.”6 In our interpretation, this means that, with another researcher’s permission, it’s kosher to blog about his or her unpublished research, but not to blog about your own unpublished research (yes, it seems strange to us, too).
At the time of this writing, there exist no official rules pertaining to conference blogging. We hope that the advice we’ve provided in this chapter will help ensure a positive experience for the aspiring conference blogger. The most important thing is to make sure that the conference has no specific edicts forbidding blogging, and then to decide how you can best contribute to the online discussion using the tools described here. And remember, conference blogging should be fun—if you’re getting overwhelmed by the amount of work that blogging adds to your conference schedule, consider scaling it back a notch.
A summary of conference blogging dos . . .
• Contact the conference organizers and potential interviewees ahead of time
• Take plenty of notes on topics that might lend themselves to a blog post
• Follow the conference hashtag on Twitter
• Create a Google Alert for the conference
• Link to or embed other conference content that you come across online
• Invite other conference attendees to write guest posts
• Ask researchers’ permission to discuss their unpublished research
. . . and don’ts
• Let blogging take over the whole conference for you
• Take a picture or other recording during sessions when such recordings are prohibited
• Post pictures of figures or other copyrighted material without permission
• Ingelfinger yourself
Travis Saunders is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Human Sciences at the University of Prince Edward Island. Peter Janiszewski is a writer, researcher, and blogger. They are the co-founders of the health blog Obesity Panacea on PLOS Blogs, as well as the Science of Blogging, a blog focusing on ways that social media can be used in science communication.
Travis is based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Peter is based in Toronto. Find them at their websites, http://www.upei.ca/science/travis-saunders and http://peterjaniszewski.com, or follow them on Twitter, @TravisSaunders and @Dr_Janis.
Notes
1. AB Ctr 4ActiveLiving, post to Twitter, May 22, 2014, https://twitter.com/4ActiveLiving/status/469499902796763136; Tim Takken, Ph.D., post to Twitter, May 22, 2014, https://twitter.com/bikedocter/status/469428314185007107; Lizz Picooli, post to Twitter, May 22, 2014, https://twitter.com/piclizz/status/46949143085635 5840; Travis Saunders, post to Twitter, May 21, 2014, https://twitter.com/TravisSaunders/status/469228905715335168; Deirdre M. Harrington, post to Twitter, May 22, 2014, https://twitter.com/DeeHarrPhD/status/469481056031088644.
2. Eva Amsen, “Storify of ’Challenging the Science Publishing Status Quo,’” F1000 Research (blog), April 25, 2013, http://blog.f1000research.com/2013/04/25/storify-of-challenging-the-science-publishing-status-quo.
3. Travis Saunders, “Swap Sitting for Sleep to Improve Your Health?,” Obesity Panacea (blog), Public Library of Science, November 2, 2012, http://blogs.plos.org/obesitypanacea/2012/11/02/swap-sitting-for-sleep-to-improve-your-health-icpaph12-beactive2012.
4. Scicurious, “How to Blog a Conference,” Science of Blogging, http://scienceofblogging.com/guest-post-how-to-blog-a-conference.
5. L. K. Altman, “The Ingelfinger Rule, Embargoes, and Journal Peer Review,” Lancet 347, no. 9012 (1996): 1382—1386.
6. Kent Anderson, “Interview with Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch,” Scholarly Kitchen, August 3, 2012, http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/08/03/interview-with-ivan-oransky-of-retraction-watch.