Birthdays are a time for reflection as well as wishing for many happy returns. With this in mind, I am devoting this blog to our past and to our future.
Our Beginnings
BugBitten was conceived by members of the Editorial Board of the Journal寄生虫和向量作为寄生虫和媒介生物学社区的独立博客。Kevin Tyler和Srimathy Sriskantharajah在最初的发展中很重要。当我在2013年9月出生时加入Bugbitten团队时，我是社交媒体的晚期，从未阅读过博客，更不用说写博客了。事实证明，这是一条陡峭的学习曲线，因为不久之后，我接管了协调编辑。
我们的目标是娱乐和信息丰富，提供新闻和观点，并强调我们希望社区普遍兴趣的新研究结果。我们的目标受众从研究寄生虫或媒介生物学的大学生到经验丰富的研究人员和讲师。因此，我们尝试将行话保持在最低限度，并通过超链接提供定义，其他信息和解释。
话题
I firmly believe in the value of reading far beyond the immediate research topic to hand and know many ideas I have had originated in this way. The most popular topics for both bloggers and readers are medically related but, as co-ordinating editor, I try to steer us towards less studied, but equally fascinating, areas hopefully providing something new for even experienced parasitologists and vector biologists.
The first blog to be posted following our launch in late September 2013 was a discussion of the高度分数as a measure of the impact of scientific research.
Since then, as I hoped, topics have ranged far and wide. Topping the bill at the moment are blogs about vector insects, particularly mosquitoes.
As our regular readers will know, we aim to post a blog every week, usually on Fridays. During this past four years we have posted 216 articles, slightly exceeding our objective by occasionally posting two in one week.
Although it took some time for the parasitology and vector biology community to become aware of us, our readership grew steadily for the first three years and has shot-up this year with views per month very close to 17,000 this August.
让我最惊讶的一件事是我们许多博客的悠久保质期。读者仍在四年前访问写博客。
Favourite blogs
Statistics compiled by our technical team at BMC record an astonishing 20,945 views for our most popular blog so far,Rats are exonerated as reservoir hosts for the Black Death, posted by me in March 2015. The blog highlights work by a Swedish group suggesting a modern co-dependency between climatic conditions, rodent population explosions and subsequent plague epidemics when populations crash and fleas move to infect humans. Using tree-ring data from locations across Asia they mapped climatic changes during the Middle Ages and hypothesise that each new wave of plague originated in Northern Pakistan and spread to Europe via the ancient caravan routes to the sea and then by boat to the ports of Europe.
自2015年以来的第二和第三个最受欢迎的博客是臭虫成为神奇药物伊维菌素的新目标有5,356次观看次数毛囊中的螨虫with 4,925 views. The former, posted, in September 2016 by Krisztian Magori, one of the founder members of the BugBitten team of editors, highlighted the award of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for the discovery of ivermectin. The latter featured work showing how the type of mites you have in your follicles is determined by your ancestry.
似乎对诸如此类主题的兴趣远远超出了我们的目标受众，反映了大多数人对与寄生虫有关的所有事物的迷恋。我在基尔大学（Keele University）讲授30多年的时间里敏锐地意识到这一点。
The future
当我们前进到第五年我们会损失ve to hear your opinion of BugBitten.
Are the blogs interesting and useful? Are we writing at the right level for you? Do you have suggestions we can use to improve the content or ideas of topics / particular findings you would like us to cover? Please write and give us your comments and we will be guided by you.
New editors sought
Finally, we are seeking to recruit new editors and frequent contributors.
我们是一支由志愿编辑组成的小型团队，他们撰写博客，招募新博客作者并帮助编辑彼此的作品，并在主持博客的BMC的员工的协助下，可以帮助您进行编辑。我们的几位原始编辑仍在发布博客，并没有失去热情。
If you are interested in joining us please contact us athttps://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/about/contact.
Tһanks for finally ѡriting ɑbout >BugBitten celebrates its fourth birthday – BugBitten