Trying to categorize SV-POW! posts

As you may know, SV-POW! uses the excellent Rogue Scholar service to archive all our posts and to allocate DOIs. There’s plenty more going on at Rogue Scholar, and one of the in-progress initiatives is an attempt to categorize scholarly blog posts. Martin Fenner, who created and maintains Rogue Scholar, has tentatively proposed a simple split into seven categories, and is seeking feedback.

His seven proposed categories are (and here I quote directly):

1. Research findings. Original results, data or analyses published first (or only) on the blog.
2. Methods and tools. How to do something: research practice, software, data and teaching material.
3. Commentary and peer review. Critical engagement with other people’s work: Reviews of papers, software, or books.
4. Review. Bringing existing knowledge together or making it accessible: Literature overviews, explainers, “state of the field” posts, accessible summaries of one’s own papers
5. Editorial. Arguments and positions on the field or on research practice: Essays, policy positions, open science advocacy.
6. Community news. The research community and working life: Conference reports, announcements, obituaries, interviews, career advice, lab news, job postings, reflections on teaching.
7. Microblogs. Short, informal posts similar to social media: a single observation, link or reaction, with little or no argument.

I thought it might be useful to try to categorize the last 40 SV-POW! posts and see where there might be gaps. Here’s what I came up with (in reverse chronological order):

(5) — No AI comments. None. No exceptions.
(1ish) — Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue
(1ish) — Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous
(6ish) — BYU’s fossil vending machine
(4) — Speculative sauropods
(6ish) — SV-POW! at 19, and trying to see what’s not there
(1) — (When) will we find apatosaurines outside of North America?
(1ish) — The atlas/axis complex of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in dorsal and lateral views
(7) — Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach
(3) — Documenting Skeletal Mounts
(7) — Current status
(6ish) — A gentle rebuke, well taken
(3) — Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk
(3) — Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026
(1ish) — Dogs are experiments in applied genetics
(7ish) — My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
(1ish) — Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis
(3) — Revisiting Aquilops and Pentaceratops at the Sam Noble Museum
(1ish) — Where did the One of our Dinosaurs is Missing dinosaur come from?
(3) — Curiousiday at the Sam Noble Museum: Sauroposeidon, Apatosaurus, Aquilops, and more
(3) — The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible
(1ish) — The mystery of the other rearing sauropod of the Egidio Feruglio museum
(1ish) — Looking for CC By photos of these rearing sauropod mounts
(1ish) — An even earlier life restoration of a sauropod (1885)
(1ish) — The Lego Natural History Museum, and the question of scale
(6) — Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
(7ish) — On the evolution of the atlas-axis complex
(1ish) — In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons
(4ish) — The Nazi sauropod — Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus“) brancai in 1937
(1) — The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published
(1) — Checklist for new zoological genus and species names
(1ish) — What was the first life restoration of a sauropod?
(1) — Belatedly … here’s DRAFT v4 of the checklist for new zoological genus and species names
(2) — Never name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus
(1ish) — Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid
(1ish) — Yet more raptors with their heads on backwards
(2) — Three Four quotes about doing good work
(2) — Do it yourself.
(1ish) — More raptors with their heads on backwards
(3) — New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocs

Some of these categorizations could be quibbled with, and 40 posts is not a huge sample, but I think there are still two findings worth discussing.

First, category 1 (Research findings) significantly dominates, with 19 of the 40 posts falling more or less into this category. That’s followed by category 3 (Commentary and peer review) with 7 posts. All seven categories do appear, but there’s only one post in category 5 (Editorial) and only two posts in category 4 (Review).

Second, it’s a bit shocking how many of our posts don’t really seem to fit neatly into any of Martin’s suggested categories. 21 of the 40 posts — more than half — I had to qualify with “ish”. For example, is A gentle rebuke, well taken really “Community news”? I put it in that category because Martin’s description includes conference reports in its brief: “The research community and working life: Conference reports, announcements, obituaries, interviews, career advice, lab news, job postings, reflections on teaching.”

Martin astutely comments on his tentative categorization:

It is no coincidence that the list has seven categories: that is the level of differentiation I can understand, even if means some details are conflated. I hope this posts generates a discussion that refines the list. Not more categories, but potentially different labels or groupings. This starting list helps clarify some questions that I wondered about ever since I started Rogue Scholar.

I think that’s smart, and I don’t want to propose adding more categories. (It really doesn’t take long before such categorizations become too unwieldy to be much use.)

But.

It’s the 15 posts categorized as “1ish” that bother me. Fully 37% of our posts fall squarely into a not-really-research category that is not included among the seven, which I would characterize as “observation”. Calling Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid a research finding is obviously an overreach, yet it seems a less wrong categorization than any of the others.

What’s more, I think that observations are a great example of what scholarly blogs can be really useful for. You would never be able to get Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous published in a journal, and probably not even onto a preprint server, yet it contains a significant and AFAIK novel observation that is properly part of the scholarly record. I have more than once published blog-posts containing observations primarily so I can then go on to cite them in a more formal paper, e.g. Atlantal ribs of the Carnegie Diplodocus, Moscow and Vienna casts cited in Taylor et al.’s (2025) history of the Carnegie Diplodocus mount.

So my humble suggestion to Martin is this: promote Observation to its own category, and merge two of the others to make space. (Maybe merge Review into Commentary and peer review, for example?)

Long live observations!

References

• Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: 10.2992/007.091.0104

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doi:10.59350/1fyxc-2sr36

Source: https://svpow.com/2026/10/22/trying-to-categorize-sv-pow-posts/