I recently researched the role of blogging in scholarship, reputation, and rankings. In April, Notre Dame will launch a blogging platform for faculty (with limited staff/student use at first). However, academics are often hesitant to jump into blogging for a variety of reasons. My hope is to answer many of the questions they may have and address their concerns.

Law is one area that has begun to look at these questions, likely because of the strong ties between law faculty and non-academic practice. Some of these articles may be useful — though they certainly don’t apply evenly across the academy for all cases. As a result, many of my examples are published by law professors but can provide excellent food for thought.

Who should blog?

First and foremost, blogging is not for everyone. Think of your blog as a garden. If you don’t weed and feed, it will never grow. You’ll end up with a tangled mess, one that certainly won’t bear fruit. So one consideration is how much time you can dedicate to it. Frequency can correlate to traffic and success, but quality may be more likely to earn you reputation. It’s more important to be regular in your blogging, so think about what you can reliably invest in the blog.

Pre-tenure faculty members may not wish to blog, as blogs are very unlikely to help in the tenure process. This may change with time. There is a discussion of how blogs may begin to affect tenure decisions in the future (written by a faculty member who is asked to evaluate tenure and promotion candidates).

How can a blog help an individual faculty member’s academic reputation?

A great example is the high-profile nature of some faculty who might otherwise be relatively unknown. Academic reputation is multi-faceted and includes those outside the immediate faculty peer group.

As two faculty law professors and active bloggers put it:

Until 2004, we were academics who wrote only law review articles and books. If we were lucky, our work was read by a handful of fellow academics, students and practicing lawyers and judges. Today, we appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, Forbes and an array of other leading newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad. We have endured two-hour photo shoots. We have spoken at Harvard Law School. Have we suddenly gotten smarter or more perceptive (or better looking)? No, we are now bloggers.Ellen S. Podgor and Paul L. Caron, Perspectives: Blogging Opens Up New Avenues For Professors

Are blogs taken seriously?

While some areas of the academy are entirely focused on peer-reviewed work (even published books/monographs are ignored), others understand the benefits of blogs as scholarship:

“One sign of the growing influence of blogs has been the number of courts relying on them. A study done in 2006 chronicled 27 references to blogs in court opinions, including one by the US Supreme Court. Similarly, blogs are cited regularly in law review articles. Another 2006 study found 486 legal citations to blogs in various reviews. Both numbers will increase considerably over time as courts and commentators become more comfortable with blogs as sources of legal analysis and authority.” J. Robert Brown, Jr., Blogs, Law School Rankings, and TheRacetotheBottom.org

The fact that blogs can publish faster and with more flexibility gives them an advantage over the peer-review process which can drag out over months or years. While academic publishing is not the same as news journalism, an expert faculty member’s opinion on current events or a hot topic becomes less relevant as time passes.

How can blogs help an institution’s academic reputation and ranking?

This is harder to pin down, but I offer several specific examples.

Search Rankings and Academic Reputation

First, blogs are content. Content is searchable. When your audience searches for something — be they prospective students, parents, faculty, or influencers at other schools, your search ranking is a valuable tool for building your reputation among many audiences. And the biggest factor in your ranking is inbound links from other sites.

Let’s take a look at Harvard’s blog system, one of the biggest examples in higher education (data obtained from Yahoo! Site Explorer):

In other words, Harvard’s blogs are 500% more likely to attract inbound links (thus influencing their search ranking) than their other web properties.

By comparison, Notre Dame’s entire web infrastructure only has 550,000 pages, and 615,000 inbound links. This represents a link to page ratio of 1.11.

Academic Rankings and Reputation

Rankings are just one way to measure academic reputation, and they may vary widely within smaller units of an organization. The English department may rank well, and the Philosophy department may not. For better or for worse, rankings are often the first thing people consider.

There are many, many factors that go into an institution’s academic reputation and its ranking. I won’t delve into all of those, but I will say that blogs won’t change your ranking directly. Indirectly, they could potentially help improve your faculty’s placement in the media, alter the perception of the public, recruit better students or faculty, and even influence your ability to get grants or partner in academic projects. All of these may then translate to academic reputation in various ways.

Some additional links, references, and resources:

Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings

Blogs, Law School Rankings, and TheRacetotheBottom.org

Blogging While Untenured and Other Extreme Sports

Perspectives: Blogging Opens Up New Avenues For Professors [op-ed]