Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Dave Munger at ScienceBlogs.com has created a series of badges (which I'm using incorrectly here) designed to be used when a blog is posting news of a science story and posting with some authority.

The most common science blog post is a lot like the most common SEM blog post - it's a "me too" post. The blogger has seen something that's worth passing on, writing up or commenting on.

We have "SEO discoveries" that become "concrete truths" when enough famous SEO bloggers cover the story (which is a bad thing, btw). The science blog community is stalked by a similar problem. If enough science bloggers comment on a story or paper then there's the risk that the paper begins to have more gravitas than it really deserves.

What Munger's badges help do is identify those science bloggers who are commenting on the story and who has looked at the original paper. ScienceBlogs.com say this;

Use of the logo, ... , means a blogger is not just commenting on research that's been reported in the media, but rather has gone, so to speak, straight to the horse's mouth to look up the original peer-reviewed journal article.

As this stands - this wouldn't work for the SEM community as not enough of us publish anything and because it's next to impossible to test in 'lab conditions'.