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EGU2020-10775, updated on 12 Jun 2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10775
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

#SciComm via the European Geoscience Union Divisions’ blogs: experiences from the editorial teams.

Valeria Cigala1, Clara Burgard2, Elenora van Rijsingen3, Iris van Zelst4, Olivia Trani5, Tommaso Alberti6, Matthias Sprenger7, Hana Jurikova8, Luke Barnard9, Gabriele Amato10, Giulia Roder11, Jonathan Rizzi12, Luigi Lombardo13, David Fernández-Blanco14, Derya Gürer15, Samuele Papeschi16, Hannah Sophia Davies17, Christian Franzke18, Davide Faranda19, Anna von der Heydt20, Stéphane Vannitsem21, Luca Dal Zilio22, Anne Glerum8, Anna Gülcher23, Diogo Lourenço24, Tobias Meier25, Antoine Rozel23, Grace Shephard26, Violaine Coulon27, Sophie Berger28, and Marie Cavitte29
Valeria Cigala et al.
  • 1Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Department of Geosciences, Munich, Germany (vale.cigala@gmail.com)
  • 2Max Planck Institut für Meteorologie, Germany
  • 3Ecole Normale Superieure Paris, France
  • 4University of Leeds, UK
  • 5EGU Communication Office
  • 6INAF-IAPS, Rome, Italy
  • 7North Carolina State University, USA
  • 8GFZ Potsdam, Germany
  • 9University of Reading, UK
  • 10IFAC-CNR, Florence, Italy
  • 11United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, Tokyo, Japan
  • 12Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research - NIBIO, Norway
  • 13University of Twente, the Netherlands
  • 14Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Univ Paris Diderot, CNRS
  • 15School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia
  • 16JAMSTEC Kochi, Japan
  • 17Lisbon University, Faculdade de Ciências, Departamento de Geologia
  • 18University of Hamburg, Germany
  • 19CNRS-IPSL-LSCE, France
  • 20Utrecht University, the Netherlands
  • 21KMI - IRM, Belgium
  • 22California Institute of Technology, USA
  • 23ETH Zürich, Switzerland
  • 24UC Davis, USA
  • 25University of Bern, Switzerland
  • 26University of Oslo, Norway
  • 27Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
  • 28IPCC WG1 Technical Support Unit, Université Paris Saclay, France
  • 29Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research (TECLIM), UCLouvain, Belgium

In an era where communicating your science goes hand in hand with doing your science, many scientists devote time to develop tools and learn new skills and strategies for Science Communication. The European Geosciences Union (EGU) has put in place one of those tools: the Divisions’ Blog. Most of the current EGU Divisions has an active blog run mainly by one or more volunteer early-career scientists. 
Regularly, both editors, and regular and guest authors write about research in their field, talk about relevant topics discussed within the scientific community, and highlight interesting facts for scientists and the general public. The goal is to provide a platform for enhancing communication among geoscientists in ways that go beyond the means of peer-reviewed publication or scientific conferences. At the same time, we aim at engaging with the general public, by writing in a technically sound, but more accessible form. Each Division’s blog has its character, like the teams behind it, making the blogs a diversified and exciting digital environment.

Here we show the main numbers, statistics, and feedback from each Division Blog, thus providing a measure of the efforts put in and the impact made so far by the broad Geoscience community. We discuss best practices, blog styles and topics which do work well or not, based on readership statistics. We also show the channels chosen for advertising the blogs, such as social media, and the impact of the choices made. Finally, we show that even though EGU has its base in Europe, we reach an audience beyond Europe thanks to active members based outside Europe and to topics addressing particular geographical areas.

We conclude that, within the increasingly essential role played by Science Communication in every research field, the EGU Divisions’ Blogs are successful at sharing research related to their fields with the broad geoscientific and non-scientific community. This success mainly relies on the time, effort, motivation, and creativity of editors and guest authors.

How to cite: Cigala, V., Burgard, C., van Rijsingen, E., van Zelst, I., Trani, O., Alberti, T., Sprenger, M., Jurikova, H., Barnard, L., Amato, G., Roder, G., Rizzi, J., Lombardo, L., Fernández-Blanco, D., Gürer, D., Papeschi, S., Davies, H. S., Franzke, C., Faranda, D., von der Heydt, A., Vannitsem, S., Dal Zilio, L., Glerum, A., Gülcher, A., Lourenço, D., Meier, T., Rozel, A., Shephard, G., Coulon, V., Berger, S., and Cavitte, M.: #SciComm via the European Geoscience Union Divisions’ blogs: experiences from the editorial teams., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-10775, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10775, 2020

Comments on the presentation

AC: Author Comment | CC: Community Comment | Report abuse

Presentation version 1 – uploaded on 30 Apr 2020
  • CC1: NH blog, Maria Bostenaru Dan, 03 May 2020

    I was in discussion when I published two books from 1. the EGU session I am running since 20 years brought to Bucharest (it was not the first book from the session though) 2. the EGU sponsored event in Rome, to publish on the NH blog. Unfortunately it did not happen. Do you know if something still can be done? 

    • AC1: Reply to CC1, Valeria Cigala, 03 May 2020

      Dear Maria, 
      thank you for your comment.

      I'm Valeria current editor of the NH Division blog. I was not, unfortunately, aware of any of the two situations you are describing. May I suggest you get in touch with me via email?  You can reach me here: vale.cigala@gmail.com
  • CC2: Comment on EGU2020-10775, Sam Illingworth, 05 May 2020

    This is a BEAUTIFUL poster, thank you so much for sharing this work! What format of blog post (iamges, Q&A, highlight, etc.) have been shown to be the most engaging?

    • AC2: Reply to CC2, Valeria Cigala, 05 May 2020

      Thank you, Sam, for the feedback and your question.

      I read engagement as more reads/post views, if you meant in another way let me know.

      I will answer for the Natural Hazards blog, in our case we see more engagement, in terms of more post views, on blogs posts telling the story of a specific hazardous event and/or of a particular region. We saw that readers find the posts mostly from Search Engines so browsing keywords (NH ca. 36% of entries), which can also mean that readers find these posts long time after publication date. I think this may be the reason for the larger success of these type of posts.
    • AC3: Reply to CC2, Clara Burgard, 05 May 2020

      Hi Sam,
      Thank you for the feedback :)
      I can give insight from the Cryospheric side.
      The statistics show that on our blog, on long-term, the most viewed pages are "for dummies" posts or similar explanatory posts, and storys/interviews about cryo-scientists. So the readers are looking for "simple" explanations on the one hand and for personal stories on the other hand.
      On the short term, the engagement seems to depend on how active the community related to the topic of the post is on social media, and on the title, main picture and social media teaser.
    • AC5: Reply to CC2, Hannah Davies, 05 May 2020

      Hi Sam,

      Thanks for the feedback, and good question! I will answer your comment from the perspective of the TS blog. We also have a lot of views on the "Interviews/meeting plate tectonics" posts, however picture heavy and shorter posts like those from "Features from the field", "Geology in the city" and a newer series "Beyond tectonics" all get a good amount of views.
  • AC4: Comment on EGU2020-10775, Tommaso Alberti, 05 May 2020

    Hi Sam,

    really thanks for your comment :-)
    From the NP point of view the most viewed pages are related to commentary on published papers, although also our format "NP Interviews" gained a lot of success :-)

  • CC3: Comment on EGU2020-10775, Joana Rodrigues, 05 May 2020

    Very interesting and clear poster! And also very nice Short Course "Science blogging for beginners"!

    Wouldn't it be interesting to have a blog on geological heritage and geoconservation? Is there, inside the other blogs, posts on these topics?
  • AC6: Comment on EGU2020-10775, Valeria Cigala, 06 May 2020

    Hi Joana,

    thank you very much for the positive feedback.

    I think it could be very interesting a blog about geoheritage and conservation. I don't think there is currently a blog dedicated to these fields within the EGU platform, in some of the different Division blogs you can find posts addressing some relatable topics.