Astrobites: Impacts on student readers and authors, and how you can use it in your work.

Presenter: Briley Lewis

Astrobites is an international collaboration of graduate students that aims to make astronomy more accessible through daily journal article summaries and other educational and professional resources. Since its founding in December 2010, Astrobites has featured more than 3,000 posts written by over 100 contributors spread across many continents. Weekday posts summarize cutting-edge research papers from the ArXiv preprint server, while additional "beyond astro-ph" content includes career advice, conference live-blogging, summaries of landmark astronomy papers, and more. Our audience includes undergraduate students, graduate students, professional scientists and astronomy enthusiasts. Astrobites has inspired similar science communication efforts in other languages as well as scientific disciplines, and also developed open-source lesson plans designed to help educators incorporate Astrobites articles and resources into their classrooms. In this talk, we will discuss highlights of our recent expansions and advocacy work, the experience Astrobites provides to its graduate student authors -- critical training in science writing and communication for early career scientists -- and the impacts of Astrobites on its readers, including both surveys of our readership and education research testing the efficacy of our lesson plans at improving students' perceived reading comprehension skills with astronomical literature. We will also discuss the ways Astrobites can help you, in whatever your role is, whether you're an educator, mentor, student, journalist, and more.