Improve Your Blog Posts With Peer Reviewed Articles

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There is a lot of junk in blogsphere and not every post is vetted and thoroughly reviewed.  Unfortunately, there is not always a clear line drawn between opinion and fact.  To assist in production of high quality articles or blog posts I recommend using a peer reviewed article as a source.

What is a peer reviewed article?

In the world of academia peer reviewed journals are similar to blogs written by trusted writers. Peer reviewed journals undertake rigorous protocols in the selection and publishing of articles.  Drafts of articles undergo critical review and assessment by other scholars in the author’s field before they are accepted for publication.  This process is similar to the way in which a blog post is scrutinized.

For example, when a writer publishes a post on his blog, the blog’s readers weigh in (or comment) on the post.  Whether positive or negative – the feedback either supports or disproves what the writer has written.  Such is the process of the peer review, also known as refereeing. The reviewers are frequently not employed directly by the journal which helps to ensure objectivity and neutrality.

How to Find Peer Reviewed Articles

Google Scholar is a free bibliographic database that indexes scholarly texts, including peer-reviewed online journals.  Google Scholar does not require users to a subscribe or pay a fee.  Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether they be online or in libraries.

As a current PhD student at Walden University, I religiously use Google Scholar to research articles and publications for my assignments and papers.  I find it user-friendly, accurate, and concise.  One of the features that I continuously take advantage of is the link on the citation that lists other publications that cited the article in question.  This allows me to see the popularity of the article and how other writers have utilized the information in the article, and sometimes guide me down different research paths that I have not considered.

How do I know is an article has Been Peer Reviewed?

I order to figure out of an article has been peer-reviewed or not you have to research the journal that published the article.  The simple way to accomplish this would be to visit the journal’s website.  Once you locate the publication’s website, locate the article submission section. This section will outline the guidelines for article submission which normally states whether the publication participates in the peer review process.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

When and if you do use a peer reviewed article in a blog post, give credit to the author. You can reference the article used, provide a link to the publication, or place a footnote at the end of your post. Citing a peer reviewed article can provide truth and credibility to your posts – which every writer can use.

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Reliability and Validity of Social Media Marketing Research

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Validity is the degree to which your assumption (construct or hypothesis) is measured by your chosen method of measurement.  Basically does your research project (the type of data gathered and the means of gathering that data) truly measure that which it is intended to measure?
Reliability is how consistently your chosen method of measurement produces the same results.  To elaborate on that ideal, reliability is also estimated by whether or not the results of your research can be reproduced under a similar methodology.
Testing the reliability and validity of social media as effective marketing channels for organizations.  The term social media refers to web 2.0 applications such as social network sites such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, blogs, wikis and Twitter (microblogging).  One can assume that not all social media is a useful marketing channel in every organization.  For example, a musician would benefit more from using YouTube as a marketing channel than would a photographer.  The photographer would more than likely benefit from using Flickr than from using YouTube.
One can implement a marketing campaign utilizing a social media application and measure the validity of the social media(SM) as an effective means of marketing for the organization.  The SM’s effectiveness could be based on a measurement of “total response” to the campaign.
From a reliability perspective it can be asked, how reliable is the use of “total response” as a reliable measurement of the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign for an organization.  If a marketing research firm conducted research of a client’s use of MySpace, in its marketing campaign, and the research results showed that MySpace was very effective way of marketing; would another marketing firm’s research yield the same results if all of the parameters in their research were identical?

The Inc. 500

In early 2007 the results of a groundbreaking study into the adoption of social media
within the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United
States, were released. As one of, if not the first studies of corporate social media adoption
with statistical significance, it proved conclusively that social media was coming to the
business world and sooner than many anticipated.  Now, approximately one year later,
that same group was studied again in an effort to look at longitudinal change in the
adoption of these digital communication tools.

Social Media in the Inc. 500: The First Longitudinal Study