BU Research Blog

Check out this blog from Mark Carrigan, originally posted here

1. It helps you become more clear about your ideas.
2. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience.
3. It increases your visibility within academia.
4. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you.
5. It increases your visibility more than a static site and allows people who find you to get an overall sense of your academic interests.
6. It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
7. It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
8. It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
9. Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and anxiety.
10. Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
11. It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some point in the future.
12. It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work, drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary into shared categories.
13. It allows you to procrastinate for a further 10 to 20 minutes before going back to NVivo in a useful(ish) way.
14. It helps you build a community around your ideas and interests – Kath McNiff
15. It allows you to start a conversation that other researchers can join using comments – Kath McNiff
16. It’s a tremendous way to access additional relevant information/sources through the connections you make – @drdjwalker
17. It can also be a great way to increase your sample size by crowd sourcing contributions and through public scrutiny help prepare you for the peer review process when the time comes to publish your work – @drdjwalker
18. It’s a great way to get international and cross-disciplinary input and reflections on your research – @jess1ecat
19. It’s a fabulous way to give back to the research community by providing links and resources for other researchers, give and you shall receive – @jess1ecat
20. Reciprocity through blogging and Twitter shares builds your profile but importantly forges lasting connections to fellow researchers – @jess1ecat
21. It allows you to publish ideas immediately without waiting two years while things go through peer review and more peer review and wait in a publishing queue – @CelebYouthUK
22. It’s fun – @CelebYouthUK
23. It’s a faster way to get your research findings out. Journal/book publishing and the peer-review/editing process can take FOREVER – @ajlusc
24. Because C Wright Mills would have probably been a blogger. If not, he would at the very least have been a fan – @ajlusc
25. It is an exercise in disciplined writing. Stuff that doesn’t get used in the bigger thesis project, published papers, and the like, can be glossed for a blog and thrown out for ‘collision’ with others’ ideas. That’s how better ideas get formulated – Ibrar
26. It makes you a better writer – @drfigtree
27. It allows raw uncensored ideas to be creatively expressed before stymied by a prolonged peer review process – @DrBenKoh

Any suggestions for more reasons? Put them in the comments box and we’ll forward them to Mark. If you’re on Twitter please include your twitter handle.