Research Blogging

 

When I started my research career, the first thing that my mentors taught me is the importance of a logbook. We were all given research logbooks upon joining the lab; I was told that this was even part of the standard issue from the government (having been trained in a government-sponsored university). We were told to keep them clean and organized. We were not supposed to white-out any mistakes in our entries. Most importantly, we were told not to tear off any page from the logbook. As my former supervisor once said, “What if your Nobel Prize-winning discovery, very revolutionary that you thought of it as a mistake, is actually written in that logbook? How would you stake your claim to the discovery if it was not recorded?” 

Of course, as scientists, we are supposed to take down notes and record all of our observations. The tradition dates probably as far back as the ancient Greeks (well, the teachers themselves did not write their lessons, but their students took down notes which eventually got published). Perhaps the most famous of the early written works by a physicist are the notes written by Galileo. He even wrote about instances when he couldn't make an observation; for example, in his notes regarding what would eventually be known as the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter (shown below), he even mentioned the time when it was too cloudy to observe the Jovian system! 

Galileo's notes. Image in the public domain.

 

Eventually, of course, the methods of recording scientific results improved from just simple illustrations on paper to digital materials like blogs and vlogs. I can still picture the scenes from Avatar and from I Am Legend when the main protagonists record the video logs of their daily observations.

Since 2012, I have been transferring my research observations from logbooks (yes, I still keep logbooks) into web logs, i.e. blogs. I found it very useful, especially during postdoc when I travel around. Even without all the data (which are then in my desktop at work), I can still show some of my results through my research blog records. 

My research blog is privately shared with the members of my own team. Sometimes, I use it to have virtual research meetings with them. They sometimes even respond to my post with a blog of their own. 

Because of its nature as a repository of raw research ideas, there is no regularity in the frequency of my postings. I even have stretches of months without posts, especially during very busy times. 

But I have been fairly active in posting ideas and results recently due to (i) the pandemic and (ii) the fact that most of my students are graduating. After posting two successive entries for two of my students doing two different research topics, I managed to view the logs I have had over the almost-a-decade of research blogging. Reading back the old posts, even those entries that have eventually been found to be incorrect, surprisingly inspired me to record more of my ideas and continue to test them out. ■