Of course there are bloggers blogging about autism, everywhere, in staggering if not epidemic numbers. But my question is about bloggers who are also autism researchers. Where are they?
Prominent academics, scientists and researchers who blog aren't hard to find, including Nobel and Fields Medal winners, major journal editors, and clumpings together of well-known figures in various areas of research. You can't go far in Science Blogs without colliding with NIH-funded researchers in various non-autism fields.
And there are many bloggers who blog about autism research, including researchers, clinicians and academics in non-autism areas. But I'm looking for autism researchers who blog, about any subject, but particularly about autism research. For my blog-searching purposes, "autism researchers" are those whose main field of research is autism and whose autism-related work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Apart from me, there is the postdoctoral fellow Lindsay Oberman, who sporadically blogs at Psychology Today. Back in 2006, New Scientist published a letter I wrote in response to an informal article authored by Dr Oberman. Michael Merzenich has been in the authorship of a few autism-related papers and also has a blog, but he has extensively published in non-autism areas and is not primarily known as an autism researcher.
The Hub blogger and behaviour analyst Interverbal promises to cough up some published research some day, for which I'm impatiently waiting. There are now other behaviour analysts who blog about autism, but those I have located are service providers, rather than researchers.
In the remarkably science-and evidence-free vaccines-cause-autism camp, there's Mark Blaxill, known for calling autism a "silent holocaust." Mr Blaxill has been in the authorship of a few published papers, and is the sole author of a 2004 review in which he beautifully demonstrated--without in the least noticing--that amount of thimerosal in routine childhood vaccinations is totally unrelated to prevalence of autism. Autism Diva was kind enough to give me the space to point out the obvious. Mr Blaxill blogs with his ilk at "Age of Autism," but who would call him an autism researcher?
So where are they, the autism researcher bloggers, and if there really are so few of us, why might this be? There is no shortage of researchers in the area of autism, and autism has been a high profile field for longer than there have been blogs. I've limited my blog reading to English-language blogs, and I've left out individuals who are involved in autism research but who haven't yet published any of this research in the peer-reviewed literature. So maybe my criteria are too limited. But where are--for example--any of the numerous well-known autism researchers I've seen at IMFAR year after year? Why aren't any of them bloggers? Can anyone point me to more autism researcher bloggers?
