By Ed Silverman
Last fall, a trio of researchers from the Rijeka School of Medicine in Croatia published a paper examining that peculiar class of people who may be loosely described as health bloggers. Their survey queried 197 English-language medical blogs and they included questions designed to evaluate bloggers' Internet and blogging habits, blog characteristics, blogging motivations, and, finally, their demographics.
“Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy.”
The results were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and found that “medical bloggers are highly educated and devoted blog writers, faithful to their sources and readers. Sharing practical knowledge and skills, as well as influencing the way other people think, were major motivations for blogging among our medical bloggers. Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy.”
Two of the researchers also formed the Health Blogs Observatory, which they call an online community, and published a directory. We reached out to Ivor Kovic, an emergency physician, about the survey and their hopes for their observatory. Take a look …
AHCJ: Why do you think it was important to do this survey?
Kovic: All of the authors (of the survey) are passionate readers of medical blogs. We followed the medical blogosphere from its beginnings and were genuinely fascinated by it. All of a sudden something new came along and you were given front row seats to musings of truly amazing medical professionals and scientists. It was like having your own personal online mentors. After a while some of us started blogging themselves, so you can say that we were not strangers to the medical blogosphere. However, we still had a lot of questions and were eager to learn and find answers.
We were quite surprised that despite the popularity of medical blogs, scientific studies about them did not basically exist. You had stories originating among top medical bloggers appearing in The New York Times or in the news sections of the core scientific journals, but nobody ever conducted any serious scientific research of medical bloggers and their blogs. We wanted to correct this by conducting a survey of top medical bloggers to find out who they are, what they write about, when, where, and how they do it, and what their motives for blogging are.
We thought it was important to conduct such research because medical blogs themselves are important. They have a great potential to enhance teaching and learning productivity, advance scientific research, and support continuing medical and patient education, as well as influence medical and health policy.
AHCJ: What do you think it tells us about the kind of health journalism we see on the Internet?
Kovic: Even before the study, we were aware that medical blogs were in most cases very different from general blogs. This was later on clearly demonstrated when we compared our results with those from other studies of general bloggers and their blogs. The crucial differences were in the practices associated with journalism. Our survey included a section to determine if medical bloggers adhered to journalistic activities, like including links to original sources or quoting other people directly.
We were very satisfied with the results, because they showed that only the minority of surveyed bloggers did not adhere to these practices. Again medical bloggers were far superior to the general ones. When you look at the big picture, this is really not a surprise, because our bloggers were extremely educated, with 71 percent of them holding a master’s degree or a doctorate. Also, many of them published books or scientific papers and have transferred some of these standards to blogging. There was some criticism that we should not be so excited about these results, because they showed that even the significant part of our bloggers did not try to often obtain permission for copyrighted material. However, even if we do not approve of this, we feel that these results should be viewed from the Internet point of view. Internet is a specific medium, and one of its characteristics are recyclability, free flow of information, and certainly speed. Obtaining specific permissions can in some cases harm the very essence of blogging.
Everything being taken into account, we think that blogs have had a major impact on health journalism on the Internet. A convergence is happening between health bloggers and health journalists. Evidence of this is evident and can be seen all over the Internet. Today you have medical blogs published by groups of five to 10 medical professionals which are managed and written with a desirable level of professionalism. On the other hand, some of the most popular health blogs are those maintained by great newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. These companies have embraced blogs, because they are indeed a great means of communication, especially since they encourage feedback by allowing readers to leave comments. Through this knowledge sharing and debating they often engage a large and loyal readership.
AHCJ: What do you plan to do with the information?
Kovic: It was very important for us to publish our paper in an open access journal. The one which allows everyone to read articles without any fee. We felt that by doing this we were honoring bloggers, who are by definition great supporters of open access to information. In our case this was also important because it allowed a rapid dissemination of the results in the health blogosphere. Numerous medical bloggers from across the globe have written articles about our paper in several different languages. We were pleasantly surprised by their support and enthusiasm.
Great debates were led on some of the top medical blogs, and their authors and readers had a lot of interesting comments and suggestions. Such a positive feedback was a great motivator for us, and we felt that we can go even further and conduct even better studies. That is when the idea of the Health Blogs Observatory came along. We started this Internet project just recently and have conceived it as an online research laboratory devoted to examination of the health blogosphere. Two major characteristics of the project are collaboration and openness, meaning that we have invited all of the health bloggers to participate in each stage of our future research. We basically want to move the online research collaboration between bloggers to a whole new level and who better to examine the health blogosphere than the health bloggers themselves. We hope that this project will lead to advancement of the health blogosphere.
AHCJ: What is your criteria for identifying health bloggers?
Kovic: For a blog to be included in our directory and, subsequently, in our survey, its main topic has to be health or medicine related. It does not have to be written by a medical professional. Quite the contrary, for example, patient bloggers writing about their disease are more than welcome. Currently, when a blog link is submitted to our directory, all of the authors visit it and agree if it can be classified as a health/medical blog and, therefore, included in the directory.
AHCJ: How do you hope to identify other bloggers not included in this report?
Kovic: Identifying medical bloggers is not as easy as it sounds. We have experienced this during our research. One of the major obstacles in our study was the fact that available directories and Web sites listing health blogs had major flaws. They were not regularly updated, had a lot of broken links, a lot of included Web sites were not even blogs, they had no structure or hierarchy to make finding specific blogs easier etc. Although things have somewhat changed since we published our paper because some new blog listings have appeared, we were still unsatisfied.
This is the reason why one of the major goals of the Health Blogs Observatory is to create the most comprehensive Web directory of health blogs on the Internet. We hope that with the help of bloggers we will be able to achieve this goal. It is of great importance that we do so, because it is the base of our research.
Ed Silverman is a bureau chief for Elsevier Business Intelligence, which publishes several titles that cover the pharmaceutical industry, including The Pink Sheet and In Vivo, and a contributor to AHCJ's blog, Covering Health . He also is the former editor of Pharmalot.
