Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting

There is a growing movement among many science bloggers for an icon that says a particular post offers thoughtful comments and analysis on an article from the peer-reviewed literature. The Mungers from Cognitive Daily have posted on this topic here, here and here. There has been great participation and great ideas thrown around in the comment threads! I suggested the name BPR3 for Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, which seemed to go over well. The icon has much more meaning though. Many of us hope that it will serve as a gateway to an aggregation feed for reporting by bloggers on peer-reviewed research. Whenever someone posts the icon on the blog post, it can link back to feed-blog. Conversely, you can use the main feeder blog to find interesting analysis by bloggers on peer-reviewed research.

BPR3.org was just launched today and will serve as main discussion website. I encourage every blogger who reports on peer-reviewed research in one or another to get proactive on this initiative early and share you voice on how to make this a worthy, user-friendly, and useful idea. I personally think its a great idea that gives bloggers more credibility, highlights literature that may typically doesn't make it to the press releases but has some significance in a field, and provides readers and authors of peer-reviewed research a centralized gateway to find interesting articles and hear different perspectives on that research. This could potentially be of enormous interest to the authors of the papers in order to gage the impact of and interest in their article or find any errors or other interpretations, as the blogosphere can be very critical of what is out there in the public domain. Journals should also be interested as well to measure the interest in their articles that is generated outside of citations. I can think of many examples where the research was very interesting and important to a certain field but gets cited very little, usually due to the size of the field.

So designs are being sought out for the icon. Below is my entry. I welcome any suggestions in the comment thread here of at BPR3.org.

Large Image:


What it looks like smaller, the size it might most commonly be used at: