{"id":9257,"date":"2013-01-20T11:39:12","date_gmt":"2013-01-20T11:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ch.imperial.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=9257"},"modified":"2013-01-20T11:39:12","modified_gmt":"2013-01-20T11:39:12","slug":"the-demographics-of-a-blog-readership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/2013\/01\/20\/the-demographics-of-a-blog-readership\/","title":{"rendered":"The demographics of a blog readership."},"content":{"rendered":"

With metrics in science publishing controversial to say the least, I pondered whether to write about the\u00a0impact<\/em>\/influence<\/em> a science-based blog might have (never mind whether it constitutes any measure of esteem<\/em>). These are all terms that feature large when an (academic) organisation undertakes a survey of its researchers’ effectiveness.\u2021<\/sup> WordPress (the organisation that provides the software used for this blog) recently enhanced the stats it offers for its users, and one of these caught my eye.<\/p>\n

\"impact-factor\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The above represents the demographics for the readership of this blog over the last ten months. In no particular order, I noted the following aspects:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The total number of countries listed was 144.<\/li>\n
  2. The country coming third was India.<\/li>\n
  3. China came 51st. I noted this since it was recently announced in the news<\/a> that China leads the world by a significant margin in patents granted for e.g.<\/em> graphene research, with South Korea third. It would also be fair to say that China also heads the field for the\u00a0number of chemists with a Ph.D. degree.<\/li>\n
  4. There are some interesting gaps in the world map, from where not a single hit was recorded. I really must crack Greenland!\u00a0<\/li>\n
  5. WordPress does not provide a demographic breakdown for individual posts, which would be an interesting one to see.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    One does not get such statistics from conventional scientific publishers, where the number of citations of an article is considered far more important than the demographics of its readership. However, I cannot help but note that access to journals is largely controlled by paid-for subscriptions (the GOLD-OA model has yet to make a big impact in chemistry I fear), whereas blogs in contrast are almost entirely open (although access to them may be restricted in some countries).\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \n

    \u2021 \u00a0I once listened to a talk by a manager whose mantra was the three e’s: \u00a0effective, efficient and economic. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With metrics in science publishing controversial to say the least, I pondered whether to write about the\u00a0impact\/influence a science-based blog might have (never mind whether it constitutes any measure of esteem). These are all terms that feature large when an (academic) organisation undertakes a survey of its researchers’ effectiveness.\u2021 WordPress (the organisation that provides the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1536,1814],"class_list":["post-9257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-manager","tag-opendata"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rzepa.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}