Scholarly Blogs: Issues of Definition

This paper examines scholarly blogging as an emergent phe-nomenon among academics of different disciplinary back-grounds, as well as science enthusiasts and practitioners wish-ing to communicate about topics related to a specific academic field with a broader public. We give a brief historical account of scholarly blogging, paired with a review of academic litera-ture about the phenomenon. Results from a survey conducted among bloggers active on scilogs.de, a German-language sci-ence blogging platform, show that considerable differences ex-ist between conceptualizations of scholarly blogging as “pub-lishing 2.0, ” i.e., a replacement for traditional venues of scholarly communication, and blogging as a new form of sci-ence journalism. Building on this differentiation, we ask what relevance scholarly blogs have today and in the future, both from the internal perspective of science and from the external vantage points of funders, lawmakers, and civil society