Posted by Erik Svensson
One thing that became apparent to me at the "Speciation 2015"-meeting last week in California was how many young colleagues follows this research blog. It is of course very satisfying, as it means that what we publish here has an impact on the scientific community, above and beyond published articles in the classical peer-reviewed article.
I know from own, first-hand experience that several young colleagues are more active on social media and read blogs, Twitter and Facebook, for instance, compared to more senior colleagues. Whatever one thinks about it this, it is a reality that we need to take in to consideration when we communicate our research and try to recruit new co-workers, such as postdocs and PhD-students.
Above, you can see the visitor statistics to our blog from May 2010 to March 2015. I started this blog on my own initative, and it was originally called "Erik Svensson Research Laboratory". After Jessica Abbott received a Junior Project Grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR), we decided to change the name to emphasize that it is a group blog, reflecting the collective work of both Jessica, me and more recently Tobias Uller, who joined EXEB last year, as well as our PhD-students and postdocs.
You can see that we had many readers until we changed the name of the blog to "Experimental Evolution, Ecology & Behaviour" in August 2011, but this probably only reflects the fact that it took time for regular visitors to find the new adress of the blog. The number of blog visitors now seems to be climbing and currently hovers between 2500 and 3000 per month, and we have readers all over the world, albeit a concentration to Europe and the US, which is not unexpected, given the large research communities in these regions.
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