Rogue Scholar statistics page relaunches
The statistics page for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive was relaunched today, as Rogue Scholar reaches the major milestone of 25,000 archived science blog posts later this week, and the work on updating all blog posts to content type blog post and including each of them in a subject area community has been concluded.
Blog Posts by Year
This page is new and shows the number of blog posts by year. Not surprisingly the number of posts has been the highest in the last two years, as Rogue Scholar launched in 2023. However over 40% of posts are over ten years old, highlighting content where long-term archiving is critical and Rogue Scholar can provide a valuable service.
Blog Posts by Language
Seventy-six percent of Rogue Scholar blog posts are written in English, reflecting the dominance of the English language in scholarly communication. German is currently the second most popular language with more than 4500 posts, mainly because this blog and Rogue Scholar are based in Germany. The large proportion of German-language posts is the main reason Rogue Scholar has more non-English content than the overall scholarly literature (about 85%, Neylon and Kramer).
Blog Posts by OECD Fields of Science and Technology
Each blog is assigned one of the 48 OECD Fields of Science and Technology by the author(s) when joining Rogue Scholar. While there are limitations with this assignment per blog (rather than classifying each individual blog post), this gives a good overview of the subject areas covered by Rogue Scholar blog posts.
Natural sciences are the largest subject area covered by science blog posts archived by Rogue Scholar, with the most popular second-level subject areas in natural sciences being computer and information sciences, biological sciences, and chemical sciences. In the workshop on science blogging infrastructure last December, I got the impression that science blogging is particularly popular in the social sciences. A more extensive analysis of science blog topic area coverage is needed before strong conclusions can be drawn.
Blog Posts by Blogging Platform
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform with blogs archived by Rogue Scholar, either the self-hosted version (WordPress) or the hosted version (WordPress.com). Again, there might be a selection bias at work.
The variety of blogging platforms working with Rogue Scholar demonstrates that the generic harvesting approach via RSS feeds is important.
More detailed analysis of these numbers will happen over time, e.g. investigating the correlation of subject area with blogging platform. Also of interest would be an analysis of metadata coverage. All blog posts have an open license (CC-BY), language information, an abstract, and are available as full-text. More than 40% have at least one author with ORCID identifier, more than 25% have at least one author with ROR identifier, and more than 5% have references made available via Crossref.
The updated Rogue Scholar statistics page was built with the Quarto and Observable open source platforms – replacing Vega used in previous versions. The statistics page is currently part of the Rogue Scholar documentation site and not yet integrated with the InvenioRDM repository platform. Please reach out (email or Slack) if you have any questions about Rogue Scholar statistics.
References
Fenner, M. (2025, February 10). It is time for a blog post content type. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/3htrx-1a525
Fenner, M. (2025, February 17). Rogue Scholar starts subject area communities. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/9zb20-k8z13
Neylon, C., & Kramer, B. (2022, June 28). Language Diversity in Scholarly Publishing. Upstream. https://doi.org/10.54900/e2p16ak-k9cyjws
Ochsner, C., Höfting, J., & Pampel, H. (2025, January 9). Perspective on Future Infrastructure for Scholarly Blogs in Germany. Research Group Information Management @ Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/4fc41-6n753