December 2, 2010

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Open Lab Update: 2010 in Blogging, by Category

On Wednesday I posted the full list of the almost 900 posts submitted to Open Lab. As part of the process that I’m using to distribute the posts to my awesome reviewers, I’ve assigned each post a primary category.

By Jason G. Goldman

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

On Wednesday I posted the full list of the almost 900 posts submitted to Open Lab. As part of the process that I'm using to distribute the posts to my awesome reviewers, I've assigned each post a primary category. (Clearly, many of the posts can easily fit into more than one category, but based on the post, the blog's general content - as far as I know or can tell - or whatever other information is available to me, I've picked one to be primary.)

Here's the breakdown of the posts by category (click to enlarge):

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CATEGORY

NUMBER

Psychology/Behavior/Cognition

126

Biology

104

Evolution

88

History/Philosophy

67

Science Communication

67

Science in Life

62

Archaeology/Anthropology

50

Ecology/Conservation

35

Physics

32

Neuroscience

30

Marine Biology

28

Chemistry

27

Astronomy

25

Health-Medicine

23

Climate Science

22

Geology/Earth Science

17

Math/Stats

17

Women/Minorities

14

Epidemiology

8

Health-General

8

Botany

7

Engineering

4

Health-Psychiatry

3

Some trends are obvious and expected, such as that there are more life science posts than physical science posts. I was somewhat surprised by the extent to which the Psychology/Behavior/Cognition category surpassed the Biology category. What trends do you see? Anything expected or surprising?

Jason G. Goldman is a science journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written about animal behavior, wildlife biology, conservation, and ecology for Scientific American, Los Angeles magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, Conservation magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes to Scientific American's "60-Second Science" podcast, and is co-editor of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (Yale University Press). He enjoys sharing his wildlife knowledge on television and on the radio, and often speaks to the public about wildlife and science communication.

More by Jason G. Goldman

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