Blogging about your event

Why blog?

Blogging can be a great way to summarize the take home message from your reproducibility workshop in a semiformal way that you can refer back to and share in the future. You can also use blog posts to help show future speakers, sponsors, or event organizers what types of things you hope to discuss or include in future reproducibility workshops.

Where should I blog?

Blogs are great ways for organizations to demonstrate their thought leadership, to promote ideas, to promote community, and even to promote their products. If neither you nor any of your collaborators have blogs, you should probably start one!

If you don’t have a blog and don’t have the time or resources to start one, you should try to reach out to reproducibility-focused organizations like Code Ocean, Addgene, Protocols.io, and eLife to see if they’d be willing to host a blog post about your event. Even if you do have your own blog, you can always reach out to these organizations and others like them to help promote your post. They might say no, but that’s okay!

Best practices for blogging

  1. Tell a story A simple story follows the format:

    1. This is how things were before

    2. Then this (amazing) thing happened

    3. This is how life is different now

  2. Make your post actionable Your post should not be a raw relaying of facts or a timeline of the events that occurred during your workshop. While this might be interesting to a small subset of people, if researchers see that they can use the information from your post to do something useful, they’ll be more likely to read it and possibly even share it with their friends and colleagues. You can even include direct, bulleted action items from the event in your “this is how life is different now” section.

  3. Break your post into sections Most people will be skimming your post and will be turned away by a wall of text. If you break your post into clear sections with headers and/or bullet points, potential readers can jump directly to the sections that they’re interested in and might do more reading than they would have done otherwise.

  4. Include popular keywords and links to other useful reproducibility resources Keywords are specific terms relating to the topic of the post and should be contained in the post header, title, and hyperlinked text. Having the appropriate keywords will make your post easier for search engines to find. One good way to choose keywords for your post is to do a web search for the broad topic covered by your post and see what terms consistently come up on the top hits. Note, keywords should not be overly broad. For example, if you’re writing about biological reagent repositories, “sharing” is a bad keyword, but “biological reagent sharing” is a good keyword (keywords can be more than one word long) Some of your keywords should be made into hyperlinks and these should direct readers to useful web resources (i.e. that other websites also direct them to and that provide further accurate description and/or have actionable information on them). Linking keywords to other useful resources will also make it easier for search engines to find your content.

  5. Include images and/or multimedia Simple but useful images that help explain a main point or message of your post will make people more likely to read (or at least skim) your post (again, having useful images is much better than having a wall of text). Useful images can also be shared on social media giving you an eye-catching way to rise above the noise of other social media posts. If there is any audio or video from the event, you can also imbed this into your blog post directly. For more blogging tips, the marketing company “Hubspot” is a great source of free blogging resources.

Example reproducibility workshop blog post

  • Scientific Reproducibility - Focusing on Solutions at the Minisymposium on ReproducibilityIn this post Tyler Ford did the following:

    • Provided background on what reproducibility is and why it is currently an issue in the biological sciences (“This is how things were before”)

    • Tyler then mentioned some resources that have been created to combat the causes of reproducibility (broken down by cause, “Then this (amazing) thing happened”)

    • Tyler points out how these resources can be used in people’s research and points out possible places for further improvement and development (again broken down by cause, “This is how life is different now”)

    • Tyler could have used keywords a little better in this post, but some of the keywords you can find in the post include:

      • Scientific reproducibility

      • Experimental design

      • Negative data

Last updated