Vegsciblog is two years old!
Prepared by David Zelený, Viktoria Wagner and Peter Minchin (blog editors)
In August 2020, we celebrated the second anniversary of our blog, so let us stop here for a while and summarize what happened in the past year. There was one big change: We renamed our blog into Vegetation Science Blog: Official blog of the IAVS journals, to broaden the coverage of journals for which we deliver content. While the original blog (called jvsavsblog.org) included Applied Vegetation Science and the Journal of Vegetation Science, newly we also cover Vegetation Classification and Survey, Palaearctic Grasslands and IAVS Bulletin. To reflect this change, we moved to a new domain, vegsciblog.org, although the old one (jvsavsblog.org) will remain functional and will smoothly redirect.
Between the start of September 2019 and the end of August 2020, we published 35 shorter Plain language summaries, 12 longer Behind the paper posts and many Editorial announcements (for statistics of the previous year, check Celebrating the first anniversary of our JVS-AVS blog from August 2019). We had almost 12,800 page views by 6,843 users from 128 countries, of which 15% were returning visitors. Most visitors came from U.S. (22.5%), Brazil (8.3%), Germany (5.7%), Portugal (4.7%), U.K. (4.7%), Italy (3.9%), Czechia (3.8%), Spain (3.4%), China (2.4%) and Canada (2.2%). Almost 51% of users read posts on mobile phones, 48% on desktops and 2% on tablets. Over 58% of users came to our blog via social media (of these, 66% by Facebook, 33% by Twitter, and few by other platforms), 26% by directly reading the blog website, 9% landed here after googling some of the keywords, and 8% by directly clicking on a link sent to them by others. In general, longer Behind the paper posts collected more reads than shorter Plain language summaries. Two the most read posts for the last year were The man who sampled a grassland for 25 years – and his data got eventually published (474 views, published in May 2020), and Studying vascular epiphytes is very hard! (428 views, published in April 2020, and containing our very first video blog).
The increasing numbers of published posts and visitors on our website suggest that we are striking the right chord with our readership. We sincerely thank all authors who contributed posts to our blog and journal editors for actively advertising our blog and sharing their editorial news. We are looking forward to another year of advertising and disseminating IAVS journal publications!
It would be best to rescale the map similar to the maps where COVID19 cases are reported in media: i.e., map the number of readers per 100,000 of population. I don’t believe that Alaska would have more than 1,000 IAVS journals readers.
Adolf Ceska
Well, Alaska is part of US, and US belongs to countries with most readers of vegsciblog.org. I agree that scaling the number of readers to the overall country population may have a sense in some cases, e.g. when we care about the relative frequency of vegetation ecologists in the population. But I am not sure if this is that case; when you count the number of participants at the symposium coming from different countries, you also don’t do that. And anyway, the map is generated by Google Analytics, and I have no idea how would I change it 🙂