What are the Research Communities?

The Research Communities can help you expand your networks and increase your impact and visibility worldwide. Through the Communities you can shine a spotlight on your work, including the challenges and successes, key findings, and the untold stories behind published papers and more.

Who are the readers?

Although the Communities’ members and wider readers are primarily involved in research, the platform is openly accessible. This means that our audience is diverse and readers can range from experts in the field, to members of the general public. Community posts are freely available online and can be shared widely on social media.

What makes a good blog post?

The writing style and language 

Impactful blog posts are written using accessible language. They break down the research they describe to account for the fact that the Communities’ readers may come from a range of different fields. For example, we recommend avoiding scientific jargon and explaining acronyms or abbreviations, where relevant. We encourage the use of a less formal, personal tone. Writing in the first person is an effective way to describe your experiences and thoughts. 

Incorporating personal stories and experiences

Blog posts can include personal stories and anecdotes. For example, why are you interested in this particular topic? How is it relevant to your experiences and area/s of research? What might this blog post contribute to members of the Communities? The use of personal anecdotes can make the content more relatable and easy to digest for our readers. 

Our ‘Life in Research’ channel, in particular, centres around the life of a researcher: from conferences and fieldwork, to vacations and personal experiences. If you are writing a blog post for this channel, we would love to hear about your experience as a researcher so that other members of the Community can learn and source inspiration from your research journey.

A logical structure and flow

To make your blog easily accessible and encourage engagement, we recommend using a logical, consistent structure. This might involve the use of subheadings, for example, to help readers move easily through the post and easily follow the narrative you are creating. 

For some channels, such as ‘Events’, the structure of your blog post may be more predictable. Please see our complete guide to ‘Events’ posts for more information on how to create and structure these types of blogs.  

By structuring your blog mindfully, you may also widen the reach of your post. Accessibility and inclusion are important considerations to factor in when uploading content onto a public forum like the Research Communities. 

The optimal length

Blog length is also an important factor to consider when drafting your post. We recommend a blog length of between 750-1000 words for regular posts, and at least 500 words for video posts.

Explain your figures, images and videos

Ensuring accessibility and encouraging engagement may also require you to include figure captions to describe your figures and/or audio-visual content. If you add images or videos to your blog, please include captions, add a description and alternative text. 

For video posts, we ask that you include an accompanying written text to explain what the video is about. The written text should be a minimum of 500 words. This will serve to drive stronger engagement with your post and allow audiences to watch your video without sound. You can also increase accessibility by providing an alternative text to accompany your video. For more information, please see our blog on how to make posts more accessible. 

Using external links 

Encouraging readers to understand the narrative and engage further with your blog may also be achieved via external links. Provided that the links are appropriate and relevant, they may allow you to provide readers with additional context (e.g. linking an affiliated organisation or institution) without going into excess detail in your writing. Please ensure that any external content is in line with our Community Guidelines and is not promotional.

Good citations and sourcing can also add credibility to your blog. Although citations are not mandatory (please be wary of copyright infringements), they increase the integrity of your blog and provide readers with the opportunity to find out more. 

What draws readers to a blog post?

Audio-visual elements

Poster images, which are visible from the Community home page, are the first thing members will see when browsing the Community. They are incredibly important in making sure your blog post looks exciting and catches the reader’s attention.

Images and video clips can draw readers in, provide context, and deepen the understanding of the research findings. Blog posts are a great way to share any ‘behind-the-scenes’ photographs, striking figures, or interesting videos that may not have been included in the research paper or shared publicly. 

You can find more guidance on our post about adding an image to your blog. We suggest that you avoid overly complex figures as these can take away from the content of the blog itself. In cases where no other visual content is readily available, it may help to break down figures with a clear figure caption. 

We often feature images from Community blog posts on our social media channels. Images should ideally be in high resolution and under 1MB in size. Animations and videos continue to gain more and more attention across the web and so we highly encourage you to add videos from your research to your posts on the Communities.

Spreading the word

Once you have published your blog post, there are a number of ways that you can directly encourage engagement with your blog post. 

Firstly, you can share it with your colleagues. In the same way that a logical, clear structure can draw readers to your blog, encouraging engagement via direct networking can do so too. Please tell your team, organisation or institution about the publication of your blog. They may be able to help you further widen the reach of your content across the Research Communities and beyond. 

You can also share your post on social media. We encourage you to make use of the ‘Share’ feature at the top of your published post, allowing you to share it directly across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The same result may be achieved by copying the URL of your post and including it in posts on external platforms.

If you have any questions about writing a blog post for any channel, please don’t hesitate to contact the team.