This is the second issue of the new monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter reports on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.

The big news this month is Rogue Scholar reaching another major milestone: 25,000 archived science blog posts! This is post #24,996 and we might reach that milestone later today.

Blogs added to Rogue Scholar

Five blogs from four different subject areas were added in February, one of them in German. Welcome everybody!

Rene Bekkers

Social Science, English.
https://renebekkers.wordpress.com/

Thinking in spatial patterns

Earth and related environmental sciences, English.
https://jakubnowosad.com/

BJPS Review Of Books

Philosophy, ethics and religion, English.
https://www.thebsps.org/reviewofbooks/

O'Really?

Engineering and technology, English.
https://duncan.hull.name/

Forschung: Migration, Integration und Zusammenleben

Social science, German.
https://blog.hrz.tu-chemnitz.de/forschungmigrationintegrationundzusammenleben/

You can search for all Rogue Scholar blogs (137 as of today) and sort the results by date joined here. 

Technical Updates

In February, Rogue Scholar received two important technical updates: blogs can now pre-assign DOIs for their posts, and the extraction of blog post references has improved.

Citations

Rogue Scholar started fetching citations from the Crossref Cited-by service and displaying them next to the blog post references. We found a total 1,023 citations so far, 38% from other blog posts and 47% from journal articles. An example blog post with references and citations is shown below:

On the history of the term 'ideophone'. https://rogue-scholar.org/records/jdrg0-vnc13

Blog post content type

Rogue Scholar introduced a new blog post content type and switched all records from preprint to blog post. This mainly affects the formatting of metadata in Rogue Scholar, and services using these metadata. A blog post in APA style looks like this:

Fenner, M. (2025, February 3). Rogue Scholar now shows citations of science blog posts. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/4bvt3-hmd07

The main differences to preprint references in APA style are the exact publication date, and the omission of the publisher (similar to journal articles).

Subject area and topic communities

Rogue Scholar automatically added each blog post to a Rogue Scholar community for the subject area, using the 48 OECD Fields of Science and Technology. Computer and information sciences is currently the largest subject area community with more than 3700 posts.

Rogue Scholar also automatically added all blog posts to one of currently 35 topic communities, if the blog posts uses the same tag/category as the community. One of the largest topic communities is Open Access with more than 1000 posts.

These communities make it easier to discover related blog posts from different blogs.

Statistics page

This week Rogue Scholar relaunched the statistics page, showing important indicators for the 25,000 archived blog posts.

These statistics provide insights into the kind of content archived in Rogue Scholar. The dashboard will be further developed in the coming months.

Community Update

The Slack Community that started in January has started to see some interesting questions and feedback. Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding this monthly newsletter.

Rogue Scholar is a scholarly infrastructure that is free for all authors and readers. You can support Rogue Scholar with a one-time or recurring donation.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2025, February 3). Rogue Scholar now shows citations of science blog posts. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/4bvt3-hmd07
  2. Dingemanse, M. (2008, January 10). On the history of the term ‘ideophone.’ The Ideophone. https://doi.org/10.59350/67ajh-mr145
  3. Fenner, M. (2025, February 10). It is time for a blog post content type. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/3htrx-1a525
  4. Fenner, M. (2025, February 17). Rogue Scholar starts subject area communities. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9zb20-k8z13
  5. Fenner, M. (2025, February 20). Adding Rogue Scholar blog posts to topic communities. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9s79t-dn14
  6. Fenner, M. (2025, February 25). Rogue Scholar statistics page relaunches. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/gg3ez-7d428