Ten simple rules for scholarly blogging

The fragmentation of social media and the rise of Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) have renewed the importance of scholarly blogs. Similar to preprints, blogs enable researchers to communicate ideas, preliminary findings, and emerging debates without waiting for lengthy peer-review processes. At the same time, blogs provide more space than preprints for contextualization, reflection, and a clearly identifiable scholarly voice.

Introduction

Scholarly blogs serve as a platform for sharing research and research related content both inside and outside the academic community (Burton, 2015; Luzón, 2013). Blogs enable a cheap, fast and informal way publishing and communicating research, which sets them apart from more traditional scientific publication types, such as monographs, journal articles and conference proceedings (Batts et al., 2008; Burton, 2015). The term scholarly communication refers to the interactions among scholars and the methods they use to share and socialize scholarly knowledge (Borgman & Furner, 2002; Burton, 2015). As scholarly communication continues to expand beyond traditional publications, researchers are increasingly expected to share their work in more open, accessible, and timely ways (Borgman, 2007). Developing these skills supports not only a researchers visibility and impact but also a more transparent and interactive research culture. Blogging enables scholars to share insights more swiftly, reach wider audiences, and contribute to ongoing public and academic debates while simultaneously fostering transferable skills such as clear writing, public engagement and research transfer (Blanchard, 2011).

The fragmentation of social media and the rise of Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) have renewed the importance of scholarly blogs. Similar to preprints, blogs enable researchers to communicate ideas, preliminary findings, and emerging debates without waiting for lengthy peer-review processes. At the same time, blogs provide more space than preprints for contextualization, reflection, and a clearly identifiable scholarly voice. During the 2010s and early 2020s, Twitter became an important infrastructure for the rapid circulation and discussion of research, particularly in medicine and biomedicine (Wetsman, 2020). Since the platform's acquisition by Elon Musk, however, this shared communication space has fragmented, and many researchers have reduced their use of X or moved to alternative platforms (Kupferschmidt, 2022; Vidal Valero, 2023).

Scholarly blogs provide a more durable alternative: open, author-controlled, and searchable publishing spaces whose governance and visibility do not depend on the decisions of a single commercial platform owner. Generative AI further strengthens the case for scholarly blogging. As AI systems make it increasingly easy to produce large volumes of fluent but potentially interchangeable or unreliable text, identifiable authorship, situated expertise, and intellectual accountability become more important. Blogging also enables researchers to share insights rapidly, reach wider audiences, and contribute to ongoing academic and public debates while developing transferable skills in clear writing, public engagement, and research transfer (Blanchard, 2011). These practices can enhance researchers' visibility and impact while contributing to a more open, transparent, and interactive research culture. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to provide researchers with guidelines for using blogs effectively in order to communicate their work, engage audiences, and enhance the visibility and impact of their research. Therefore, in this article, we present ten simple rules for scholarly blogging that aim to support and encourage scholars to establish a blog that contributes to a more open, transparent form of scholarly communication by offering practical guidance for scholars seeking to engage more actively in this form of scholarly communication.

Rule 1: Define Your Purpose and Audience

Follow good scientific practices, while adopting a more personal and less formal tone to build your online identity (Blanchard, 2011; Kjellberg, 2010). There are many types of blogs that range from topic-focused research blogs, blogs accompanying dissertation research, blogs by research groups or about research projects, blogs about sources and methods, blogs by institutes or academic such as archives and libraries, seminar and conference blogs, blogs accompanying a journal or publication, blogs for teaching and didactics, review blogs or blogs for academic debates (König, 2015). Blogs allow for various scopes and types of use and can be adapted to the needs of blogging scholars (Baez et al., 2011) that can express themselves independently of restrictions or content guidelines (König, 2015). Blogging furthermore serves as a powerful tool for reflection, offering a space to think aloud, documenting your research journey (Blanchard, 2010; Blanchard, 2011) as a personal-public diary (Gloning, 2011) and help clarifying one's own thoughts, since ideas and thoughts can be organized through writing (König, 2015). Beyond personal reflection, blogs can document the evolution of ideas (Bouwma-Gearhart & Bess, 2012), failed approaches, and methodological decisions that are often omitted from formal publications. Furthermore, Blogs offer researchers the opportunity to report on ongoing research and also to publish even minor research findings or to make the research process transparent in the spirit of Open Science, e.g., by publishing hypotheses, thoughts, and fragments (Döring, 2017; Pampel & Rothfritz, 2024). This transparency not only supports reproducibility but also provides valuable insights for other researchers as well as yourself and your writing process (Blanchard, 2011). Keep in mind that a blog is a collection of blog posts rather than a one-time publication. Aim for a regular publication frequency that you are comfortable with, anywhere from once a week to several times per year. Your target groups can be other scholars, students, or the public, especially citizens with an in interest in research. Define one or multiple audiences and your unique selling point in terms of content, design or context (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, n.d.; Kuhle et al., 2025).

Rule 2: Choose a Platform

As there are many good blogging software options, a blog should not be hosted on a generic website. You can choose between hosting your blog yourself or choose a platform to host it for you. While self hosting gives you complete control over the mission of your blog, depending only on your skills and time, it is also more effort and responsibility to do so, compared to choosing an external platform. In case of self hosting, be aware that you are not only responsible for hosting but also for ensuring the long-term access of your content. However, platforms also come with dependencies, conformity and sometimes costs. Consider risks of sticking with one platform before making a decision. Popular blogging platforms that are also commonly used by researchers are WordPress.com, Substack, or Blogger. Be aware that commercial platforms such as Substack also come with the risk of instability. You can set up your blog somewhere that already provides readers, like specialized blogging platforms for scientific content (Blanchard, 2010) such as Hypotheses, facilitating the the development of online relationships (Davies & Merchant, 2007). Many blogging platforms provide the WordPress software. If you decide to self-host other software solutions are Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll or Quarto (Ochsner et al., 2025b).

Rule 3: Ensure Quality and Credibility

Ensure quality over quantity. Maintain high standards of accuracy, transparency, and reliability in your blog posts. Since there are few formal control mechanisms that ensure readers the quality of the content, blogs are part of science and scholarly communication and should reflect good scientific practice. Clearly reference sources, link to original research, and contextualize your research. Using formal references often comes with the benefit of ensuring that links don't break and are more stable. Where possible, informal peer feedback by colleagues can help ensure quality and build trust with your audience (Batts et al., 2008). If you notice outdated content in older blog posts you can create a new version of the blog post and make sure the new version is visibly linked to in the old post. Do not use AI just to artificially generate a lot of output. The application of AI may reduce your readers' trust and your credibility (Nakano et al., 2026). If you use AI, be transparent about it but also be aware that AI bears risks of producing incorrect content and hallucinated references (Sun et al., 2024), which results in you having to control the quality of the AI generated content. Ultimately you as the author are responsible for all content. It's important for your audience to know that there is a person behind your blog, not an AI or an organization. Ultimately, ensuring this personal dimension is what keeps blogs relevant.

Rule 4: Foster Dialogue and Build Community

Connect with your audiences through your content. Blogs offer the opportunity to be engaging, entertaining and even opinionated. As opposed to magazines, newspapers and television, blogs offer your the opportunity to be responsive (Wilkins, 2008). A classic way to foster community building is through blogrolls (Ochsner et al., 2025a). Blogrolls are recommendations for other blogs that bloggers curate on their starting page (Rettberg, 2008). While blogrolls are not as commonly used these days, they can still enhance the community aspect of blogging and the dissemination of research (Ochsner et al., 2025a). Allow comments, respond to feedback, and engage with other blogs to create dialog and facilitate research through communication (Blanchard, 2010). In addition to connecting with your community, comments and discussions enable an open peer review process (Batts et al., 2008). However, do not be discouraged if you do not receive many comments. Your blog is still being read; channels of communication have changed over the last decades of blogging through the emergence of social media. However, social media also makes it possible to integrate comments, for example through WordPress and Ghost. The reach of your blog and it's public online engagement can be increased by using social media (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, n.d.; Kuhle et al., 2025). Social media posts that target a wider, public audience show the most effect (Kuhle et al., 2025). Dialogue can also place take through more formal ways of science communication by being cited and becoming part of the scholarly record.

Rule 5: Encourage Data Flows for Greater Impact

Use feeds as primary distribution channels for your blog posts. A blog feed is a standardized, machine readable web link that can be integrated into other applications or sites to share and exchange data (Rettberg, 2008; Yee, 2008). Readers can subscribe to blog feeds through a feed reader that will then alert them when new content has been published (Rettberg, 2008). Use an appropriate format, like Atom and make sure the metadata in the feed is correct and that the full text is included. Each blog post in the feed should also provide information on the title of the post and the blog, its author or authors, and its publication date, and an open license (Fenner, 2023). Many feed readers also support the exchange of subscription lists via Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML), allowing readers to easily import, export, and share the blogs they follow. Other formats, such as newsletters, podcasts, social media, or comments, are supplementary. Newsletters provide an accessible alternative for readers who do not use RSS. Blogging platforms, such as Ghost or Substack, support both RSS feeds and email newsletters, making it possible to reach audiences through their preferred channel without maintaining separate publishing workflows. Offering both options helps maximize the accessibility and reach of your blog while allowing readers to choose how they receive updates.

Rule 6: Use Open Licenses to Enable Reuse

Make the reuse of your posts possible by providing a license, such as those provided by Creative Commons (CC). CC is a non-profit organization that provides licenses which can be used to define the legal conditions of distributed content (Creative Commons, n.d.). The gold standard for open access publications is the CC-BY license (Fenner, 2023; Redhead, 2012) that enables reuse as long as attribution is given to the author (Creative Commons, 2019). Other CC license options such as No Commercial use (NC), No Derivatives (ND), and Share-Alike (SA) add restrictions that limit reuse and therefore the reach of your posts (Redhead, 2012). Refraining from using licenses leads to your content not being able to be reused.

Rule 7: Support Citation

Web-based persistent identifiers (PIDs) identify internet resources and were invented as a reaction to link rot (Klein et al., 2014). Common PIDs in research are Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are unique, persistent digital identifiers that enable reliable access to a digital object (doi Foundation, n.d.) and the most persistent identifiers in research data repository systems (Klump & Huber, 2017). DOIs are assigned via Crossref and DataCite and come with the automated retrieval and import of metadata (Herb, 2025). The redirection of DOIs helps prevent link rot, as blogs might move to different domains or use a different link format depending on the blogging platform. DOIs are also relevant when it comes to the long-term archival of your posts. Bloggers can attain DOIs through the digital blog archive Rogue Scholar that preserves blog content, assigns DOIs to blog posts, and ensures additional redundancy through web archiving with the Internet Archive. Displaying DOIs and a citation proposal under each blog post is recommended (Fenner, 2023). Additionally, blogs can be assigned International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSNs), a widely used identifier for periodical publications (Ochsner et al., 2025a). DOIs need to be registered with metadata, we provide a list of relevant metadata in the next rule.

Rule 8: Support Metadata

Metadata are data that refer to information about other data. (Zeng & Qin, 2020). Metadata that are embedded in blogs are used by reference managers and indexers and for the registration of DOIs. To be reusable for reference managers it should be made available via HTML meta tags and/or Schema.org JSON-LD. The metadata should furthermore be available for download in a standard bibliographic format (Fenner, 2023). The metadata associated with a scholarly blog post should include the following elements: First, the title of the blog post and the title of the affiliated blog should be provided. Information about authors and contributors, like editors should also be included. Make sure to list all the author's names instead of referring only to the name of an organization or research group. In addition, each contributor should be identified through their Open Researcher and Contributor (ORCID), while their affiliated research organization should be identified using its Research Organization Registry (ROR) ID. Metadata should further specify the licensing information under which the post is published, with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license being the recommended option. A short abstract summarizing the content of the blog post should be included, together with the language in which the post is written. While English is an important language used in scholarly communication that appeals to a large audience, with reference to the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (Federation of Finnish Learned Societies et al., 2019) we encourage you to also blog in your native language. To ensure persistent access, the metadata should include either the URL of the published post or, where available, its DOI. Information about the publication date and any subsequent updates should also be provided to document version history. When DOIs are assigned to different versions of a post, each version should receive its own DOI, alongside a DOI that represents all versions and resolves to the most recent one. Finally, the metadata should acknowledge any funding that supported the underlying research, including grant identifiers where available. If the blog has been assigned an ISSN, this should also be included. Finally, the metadata should specify the subject area(s) of the blog post, improving its discoverability (Ochsner & Pampel, 2026b).

Rule 9: Recognize Blogs as First-Class Research Outputs

Contribute to establishing blogs as legitimate scholarly outputs. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) (CoARA, n.d.) calls for acknowledging the diverse range of outputs, practices, and activities through which research generates value for science and society. Blogs belong to this range, alongside data, software, and other non-traditional outputs. The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (Federation of Finnish Learned Societies et al., 2019) adds a related point: blogs let researchers communicate beyond the often English-dominated journal system, reaching audiences in their own languages. Institutions and funding organizations should create conditions to recognize such contributions in research assessment. This can also include the transfer of research results to practice, policy, and the public through blogs. The German Research Foundation already acknowledges the relevance of blogs in its guidelines for safeguarding good research practice (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2025), but broader international recognition is still missing. Valuing blogs as part of a diverse research output portfolio would support CoARA's vision of research assessment beyond journal-based metrics.

Rule 10: Read and Engage With Other Blogs

Actively participate in the blogosphere. Ask your readers about what kind of content they would like to see on your blogs. Let your audience help shape your Blog. Read other blogs to stay up to date with developments in your research community and to discover new perspectives, tools, and ideas. Feed readers will notify you when new posts of blogs you are subscribed to are published. Engaging with other blogs should go beyond reading. Leave comments, respond with your own blog posts, share interesting articles with colleagues, and cite blog posts when they provide useful insights or document software, methods, or discussions that are relevant to your work. Saving blog posts in your reference manager helps you organize valuable resources and makes them easier to cite later in blog posts, publications, presentations, or teaching materials. Engaging in connecting with your community strengthens connections and relationships and contributes to a more open and collaborative scholarly communication ecosystem.

Conclusions

Scholarly blogging are a flexible, open and fast addition to traditional scholarly publishing and science communication. Blogs also provide a low entry bar into scholarly communication and give you room to express something important that doesn't fit into other scholarly publishing formats. Finally, blogs provide a platform for experimentation, by including code and data, as for example frequently seen with the Quarto blogging platform. By following these ten simple rules, scholars can create meaningful, accessible, and impactful blogs that foster dialogue, support openness, good scientific practice, and encourage continuous reflection, ultimately strengthening both individual research practices and the broader scholarly communication landscape. Blogging is a community practice that allows you to curate and disseminate information, not only a an individual, but also within a participatory space. Finally, blogs provide a space to express your personal voice, which is increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content.

Funding

The work of Catharina Ochsner is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project Kooperative Informationsinfrastruktur für wissenschaftliche Blogs (Infra Wiss Blogs) (project number 528958385). Heinz Pampel was partly funded by the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF).

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