You have spent years on a thesis, or eighteen months steering a paper through peer review. It is finally out. And then… very little happens. A few colleagues download it, your supervisor sends congratulations, and the work settles quietly into a database.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A short, well-written blog post is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to give your research a life beyond the journal, and there is good evidence that it works.
Research in the regional studies field is rooted in place, but it rarely stays local. A study of housing policy in Manchester speaks to planners in Melbourne; a project on heritage-led regeneration in Kraków will interest a city council in Porto. As the host of almost every regional studies webinar over the years, I have seen how research on one place might resonate far beyond it.
Journal articles reach those people slowly, if at all. Many sit behind paywalls, and many practitioners, policymakers, journalists, community organisations and researchers at institutions without large library budgets are unable to access them. A blog post is free to read and can travel across time zones in seconds. It expands your research beyond academia and across borders.
What the evidence says
In their 2025 paper, ‘How to do Academic Blogging’, Stevenson, Balloo and Piper report a survey of blog readers, authors and editors, in which nearly two-thirds said a blog post had prompted them to seek out the author’s journal articles, and nearly half had contacted a blog author directly.
In her article, ‘The Unexpected Benefits of Academic Blogging’, Scoles found that bloggers’ unexpected benefits were invitations to collaborate, from co-authored papers and research projects to keynote talks.
The Conversation US Author Survey 2026 (670 responses) found that 80% of scholars reported post-Conversation article impact, such as media interviews (53%), collaboration opportunities (32%). 21% saw more citations.
Earlier studies point the same way: a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper by McKenzie and Özler, published in 2011, found that links from economics blogs caused a sharp rise in abstract views and downloads of the papers they discussed.
The honest caveat concerns citations; a 2025 review (Altmetrics in the evaluation of scholarly impact) found only a weak correlation between blog mentions and later citations. What we can say is that blogging brings readers and widens connections; citations may follow.
A skill worth having
Writing for a non-specialist reader forces you to cut through the jargon and clearly say what you found and why it matters: the classic elevator pitch in print. It invites responses that a journal article rarely gets: a reader might have a relevant case or helpful data to contribute to your study, and a broader international audience might lead to future collaborations. Someone might challenge your argument, sharpening your next paper. Blogging is both a research tool and a communication tool.
Condensing a 9,000-word article, let alone an 80,000-word thesis, into 800 words is a distinct skill. You have to pick the one finding that matters most and lead with it. Leave the literature review and most of the methods behind. Stevenson et al.’s paper summarises ten helpful tips for writing an academic blog.
If you’re a PhD or master’s student, explaining your project in plain language is a powerful way to clarify your thinking. If you are unable to state your central argument in a paragraph to an imagined outsider (think that elevator pitch again), it is always better to find this out earlier in the process than at your viva. A blog extends your work beyond your immediate network and opens it up to feedback from people with different thinking and research experience.
The fishing line
Think of research communication as a fishing line. Social media promotes the blog; the blog promotes the journal paper. The social post is the cast, putting the line where people are. The blog is the line, carrying a curious reader from a passing glance to real understanding. The paper is the catch.
If your work appears in the RSA eBulletin or RSA Blog Update, the hook is a single sentence. In a 2025 De Gruyter Brill survey of nearly 1,800 scholars, two-thirds of regular social media users had reduced their time on the platforms, and three-quarters preferred receiving publisher updates by email. That makes the newsletter line one of the most valuable sentences you will write. Write it first: if you cannot say why your research matters in one sentence, the rest will not help.
A paper with no line rarely gets caught. A line with no hook catches nothing.
Getting started
- Find a home: how about the RSA Blog?
- Time it with publication, when interest peaks.
- Post it on social media and add the link to your email signature.
Your research deserves readers. A blog post is how many of them will find it.