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