Peer reviewed, or just blogged?

Written byAlison McCook

| 1 min read

A University of California, San Diego communications professor is starting an unusual experiment today (Jan 22): He's testing whether a large online community of academic bloggers are better at peer review than a few hand-picked experts. To compare the two review methods, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting excerpts from his new book about video games onto the linkurl:blog;http://grandtextauto.org/ Grand Text Auto, run by himself and five colleagues. He linkurl:told;http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm the Chronicle of Higher Education that the blog attracts academic scholars and video-game players, and receives up to 200,000 visitors per month. "This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics," he told the Chronicle. He is using a tool called CommentPress to allow bloggers to add notes to the excerpts. Wardrip-Fruin's editor at MIT Press is simultaneously running the book through traditional peer review, to enable the author to compare both evaluation methods. Can't get enough of linkurl:blogging;http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/01/introducing_researchbloggingor.php about peer review? There's a new site (announced at last week's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference) called linkurl:researchblogging.org;http://researchblogging.org/about.php that lets bloggers share their posts about peer reviewed-research. If you blog about peer-reviewed research, a simple code will enable researchblogging.org to catalogue and display the entry - "thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs, in one convenient place, organized by topic," according to the Web site. "If you're a blogger who writes about serious research, Research Blogging offers you a way to distinguish your serious posts from news, politics, family, bagpipes, and so on." It's been an interesting week in science blogging: See Deputy Editor Ivan Oransky's coverage of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, where he blogged about a linkurl:new wiki-type site;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54184/ for science blogging ethics, and linkurl:why only one-fifth;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54185/ of science bloggers are women.

Peer reviewed, or just blogged?

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