14 Guidelines for Writing PLOS ‘Field Reports’ Blog Posts
Content Guidelines
1) The level of the scientific content in your post
Community sites feature blog posts and comments written by researchers aimed primarily at their peers. You may therefore aim your comments and blog posts at the broad research community. However, other researchers reading your posts and comments will be at a variety of levels in their training and careers, and may occupy related sub-disciplines, other than your own. We ask that you explain terms that are complex, new or particular to a sub-discipline — in one of three ways.
- Add an explanatory paragraph to provide more in-depth background
CRISPR is a new genetic engineering method, one of a group often called advanced gene editing. It is based on a kind of adaptive immune system that bacteria invented three billion years ago. Bacteria remember the viruses that have infected them and put together a targeted molecular defense so that the next time the same virus comes around, it is cut up and killed
- Link to another site that contains a clear and concise definition, such as Wikipedia.
- Define the unfamiliar term in line; e.g. while, for the PLOS Neuroscience Community reader, “fMRI” doesn’t require a definition, the less familiar (to neuroscientists) term “Granger causality” does; i.e. “a method (or rather a family of methods) that had originally been developed to make predictions in economics.”
…in 2005, they first reported cells in the rat’s entorhinal cortex, a brain region that acts as an interface between the hippocampus and the neocortex, whose activity waxed and waned depending on the location the rat was walking through.
I’ve been working on the role of agent representation — essentially how we make sense of other autonomous beings in the world and how we understand them in terms of their choices, actions and mental states — and how it applies to hallucinations…
Lastly, be aware that your readers are likely to include members of the science press, undergraduate students, science teachers and patients. While leaning towards a higher level of understanding, i.e. that of your peers, a good science communicator can include many levels of scientific knowledge in a single post — without alienating most readers. And if you specifically wish to deal mostly or entirely with highly dense technical content in your post, state that in the introductory paragraph. Say who it’s for.
2) Always include an introductory paragraph in your post; in journalism, this is a “lede.” Use your lede to:
a. Summarize the post, in particular mentioning what article(s) you will be talking about and who the authors are.
b. Get to the main point of the research. Say what issue the findings illuminate or the question the authors seek to answer — without listing specific findings.
c. Tell readers why this research or area of study matters.
Two effective ledes introducing recent PLOS Neuro posts:
What is causation, and how do you proceed to measure it? The question has kept humans thinking for millennia. Now, researchers in Switzerland and Italy have been making inroads in determining causation — albeit in a much restricted sense: that of validating measures of effective brain connectivity from EEG recordings in the context of neural networks. The team, led by Gijs Plomp from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, reported this progress in two recent articles, published in Neuroimage and the European Journal of Neurosciencerespectively, that will be briefly discussed here (NB: the articles are not Open Access).
In a keynote at the 7th annual Neuroinformatics Congress in Leiden, the Netherlands on August 25, Dr. Michael Milham discussed how resting state fMRI (R-fMRI) has emerged as an approach for psychiatric biomarker identification by enabling the uncovering of human connectome variations that are associated with diagnostic status. However, as Dr. Milham stressed in his talk, even as it enters the mainstream, this approach still faces many challenges. He reviewed these challenges, provided potential solutions, and offered concepts for discovery and validation of biomarkers that can be expanded to alternative modalities, such as magnetoencephalography or diffusion weighted imaging.
3) Sub-headings: use them! They make reading online easier and also help readers estimate how technical the post is going to be.
4) Post headings: Keep them short and sweet! Also include the hashtag of the event somewhere in your heading — this helps anyone looking at the blog feed identify which event you’re blogging about at a glance. E.g. ‘Computational Biology: Looking Forward #CBSymp16’
Other Blogging Guidelines
5) Editing: Your post will be reviewed by a Community Site Editor, who may do copyediting, make suggestions for revisions and/or ask for changes. PLOS retains the right to remove any blog post that, in its view, violates PLOS Community guidelines.
6) Length: The post should be a minimum of 500 words up to 1500 words.
7) References: Please embed links to references in the body of your post and list references and DOIs at bottom.
8) Comments: You are expected to respond to comments on your post in a timely manner.
9) Licensing: Your post will be subject to the CCBY content license governing all PLOS published materials.
10) Images/figures: Any included need to be CCBY (or if crucial with permission) and contain proper attribution. e.g. Photo by tvol, Flickr / CC BY. Tip: Try to link to the original source to the license. For advice on how to attribute images/figures correctly please click here.
11) COIs: If you have any conflicts of interest to declare (e.g. that you are a PLOS ONE Academic Editor, or a coauthor of a paper you treat in the blog post), please do so in the body of the text.
12) Follow PLOS general blogging and commenting guidelines. These apply to any PLOS BLOG Network or Community blog post, and cover the basic rules of civility and the responsibilities of bloggers and anyone wishing to leave or respond to a comment.
13) Disclaimer: Please state at the end of the blog that any views expressed are your own, not necessarily those of PLOS.
14) Bio: Provide a headshot and a once sentence bio of yourself (a link to a longer bio or website is fine) with your Twitter handle.
If you have any questions, please contact Jessica at ploscompbiol@plos.org
