The BOU offers authors of ornithology papers published in any journal the chance to promote their work and benefit from all that blogging now offers.
Blogging about your recently published research article now has a greater benefit – blog posts linked to papers now count high to individual article metrics (e.g. altmetrics). Individual article metrics are increasingly important in measuring an article’s impact and will start to contribute to research impact assessments (e.g. REF in the UK).
A BOU blog article benefits you and your article in the following ways:
- Blog posts with links to an article count towards the article’s altmetrics
- More readers – BOU blog posts can get thousands of views
- Produces a digestible lay summary to reach a new audience
- Many people prefer to read shorter summaries of papers before accessing the paper itself
- Not everyone has access to the full paper version of many journals
- You can promote and link to other online work (contributing to the altmetrics of those articles too)
- Search engines love blogs, which increases your spread and delivers a wider audience for your work
- The BOU promotes individual blog posts heavily on social media driving audiences to your work
- Each main BOU blog post gets the blog to itself for two weeks
We encourage authors to write a non-technical summary of their paper, an interesting story from the fieldwork that led up to the paper, or to use the blog to expand on an aspect of the research – in fact anything related to your paper!
What we need for a BOU blog:
- We’ll publish blogs containing between 500 – 1,000 words
- We can even base a blog post on a Q&A style interview
- Several images, figures, video clips, sound files (one image needs to be suitable as a thumbnail to advertise the post – preferably an image of a bird) – you must have permission from the copyright holder and provide names and website credits for each item used (information on size and formats will be provided)
- References and links to other online related items (to promote your own work or simply to deliver extra reading)
- A photo of yourself with a brief, max. 100 word, biography of who you are and what you do
See the BOU blog (above left) for examples of recent posts, the diversity of topics covered and for the type of post and images we are looking for.
If you want to discuss a blog, or submit a post, then please email the BOU’s Social Media Engagement Officer, Christina Ieronymidou.
Useful reading
Almetric is here. But what is it? What is it for? And why should you be bothered?
Making social media and the web work for you
An introduction to social media for scientists
How Twitter literacy can benefit conservation scientists
