MINI REVIEW article

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.
Sec. Research Assessment
doi: 10.3389/frma.2022.824538
This article is part of the Research Topic

Science of Science: Connecting Multidisciplinary Studies of Research, Higher Education, and Society

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The role of blogs and news sites in science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic

Grischa Fraumann1, 2* and Giovanni Colavizza2, 3
  • 1R&D Department, TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany
  • 2Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands
  • 3Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Provisionally accepted:
The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

We present a brief review of literature related to blogs and news sites; our focus is on publications related to COVID-19. We primarily focus on the role of blogs and news sites in disseminating research on COVID-19 to the wider public, that is knowledge transfer channels. The review is for researchers and practitioners in scholarly communication and social media studies of science who would like to find out more about the role of blogs and news sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. From our review, we see that blogs and news sites are widely used as scholarly communication channels and are closely related to each other. That is, the same research might be reported in blogs and news sites at the same time. They both play a particular role in higher education and research systems, due to the increasing blogging and science communication activity of researchers and higher education institutions (HEIs). We conclude that these two media types have been playing an important role for a long time in disseminating research, which even increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can be verified, for example, through knowledge graphs on COVID-19 publications that contain a significant amount of scientific publications mentioned in blogs and news sites.

Keywords: Altmetrics, knowledge transfer, Science Communication, science and society, blogs, news sites, COVID-19, Scholarly information

Received: 29 Nov 2021; Accepted: 02 Sep 2022.

Copyright: © 2022 Fraumann and Colavizza. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Grischa Fraumann, R&D Department, TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Hannover, Germany