The Medical Care Blog is celebrating our 5-year ANNIVERSARY! We’re also celebrating the fact that we’ve landed on a list of the “Top 100 Healthcare Blogs to Follow in 2019“. We thought it would be a good time to stop, take stock, and share a few things we’ve learned over the past 5 years of blogging at the intersection of public health and medical care.
- The average peer-reviewed research paper is probably read in its entirety by 10 people or fewer. In contrast, a blog post can reach thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people – including decision-makers who might actually use the research in making policies that affect hundreds of millions of lives.
- It only takes a few tweets to get a research article into the top 25% on the Altmetric Attention Score.
- Blog readers are busy, and maybe stressed and overworked! Don’t make it hard for them to understand your points. Answer the “so what” question up front. Don’t use a lot of jargon. Talk directly and as clearly as possible to your readers.
- Writing about scientific research can be really hard to do. It takes effort to figure out the main points and how to communicate them in a way that can be easily understood by people without your level of background knowledge about a topic.
- The Medical Care Blog has attracted an incredible cadre of contributors. We’ve engaged nearly 100 writers–researchers, physicians, public health practitioners, journalists and students–who have contributed 225 posts since we’ve been tracking our statistics. This speaks volumes about the welcoming forum that this blog provides.
- Our contributors are invaluable. We share diverse and innovative work, help interpret and make sense of the research literature, and share perspectives that frequently challenge our thinking. On that note, we are always looking for new contributors to blog about public health and healthcare – join us!
- More of you than ever are reading our collective work. Last year our blog had more than 28,000 unique reads, up from just 9,000 in our first year.
- Lastly, what is probably most powerful about this forum is simply the quality of the work. Our authors and editorial team work (all on a volunteer basis, mind you) to ensure interesting and high quality writing and evidence-driven reasoning. That the top 10% of our posts average about 800 unique reads each is evidence that our readers are engaged and sharing our high-quality work with others.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the next 5 years!