From blog posts to research papers; successful cases?

First, it totally depends how you define the term “research paper”. Some people uses a blog in such a way that (some or all) blog entries are actually akin to minimal-size “research papers”, albeit with a nonconventional publication mean and possibly nonconventional format.

Secondly, it also depends where you draw the line between “turning X into Y” and “writing X based on Y”. Obviously, many journals would object to publishing material that has already been published somewhere else, including on a personal blog. Moreover, publishing identical content in two very different media probably means that it is not fully adapted to one of the two (or both): to give only one example, you don't typically have the same language level on a blog as in an academic paper.

Finally, an example: scientific writer Philip Ball has a blog on the topic of Water in Biology, and he also regularly publishes “News & Views” articles for Nature (one example there). In both cases, he writes critical reviews the recent literature on the same topic: there is wide overlap, but he does not publish his papers by directly converting blog posts.

This not an exact answer, however PolyMath is an interesting example of a result which was obtain using social tools (not exactly blog, but related...)

Here is an example from ecology. I think this is an excellent example of how an initial blog post/idea was developed with the help of comments from readers of the blog, and then turned into a paper. There was a follow-up discussion of the paper on the blog, also with an invited response from authors that disagreed with the conclusions in the paper (they also published a response paper).

Initial blog posts (with a very active comments section):

• http://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/zombie-ideas-in-ecology/
• http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/zombie-ideas-about-disturbance-a-dialogue/

Paper:

• Fox. 2013. The intermediate disturbance hypothesis should be abandoned. TREE.

Follow-ups:

• http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/zombie-ideas-in-ecology-the-tree-paper-is-now-online/
• http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/a-thumbs-up-for-the-intermediate-disturbance-hypothesis-guest-post/ (guest post from researchers taking the opposite view)