How to blog scientific research?
As someone who does scientific research, I haven’t figured out how blogging fits into my investigations. I’m an experimental psychologist. That means I run controlled experiments, gather data, and analyze the results using statistical methods. The scientific tradition says you don’t publish your findings without first having peers review your work to say, “Yep, this looks good.” The review process filters what goes from scientists to the rest of the world. And that’s a good thing. Today the Internet — especially blogging — makes this tradition seem old and slow. Why wait three years for your study to be reviewed and printed when you can share the key findings in three minutes? For example, my Stanford lab recently completed an experiment investigating one way to increase use of a mobile phone application. The data show that a simple manipulation we made motivates people to use the app almost twice as much. Pretty cool. But here’s the problem: If we go through peer review, people won’
