For those of you who have been wondering what a Twitter Journal Club might look like (and who haven’t taken the plunge to follow along during the International General Surgery Journal Club), here’s our Storify from this past week. Enjoy, and questions and feedback welcome either here on the blog or on Twitter. I was overjoyed to see some terrific resident engagement this week- and we pulled a Pharm D in!
The twitter journal clubs in which I have participated have been fantastic. I believe that in the future we will see more and more specialties creating regular Twitter journal club meetings, as they provide not only public collaboration between specialties either lurking or actively participating, but also create a way to incorporate international Twitter users into the chat, thus improving cross-cultural understanding and increasing exposure to the many ways in which medicine is practiced worlwide.
The biggest area in which I believe Twitter journal clubs could improve is in providing participants a link to the full PDF of an article. Technically a link could be shared publicly in the chat, but doing so may infringe on copyright of the specific article. Alternatively, individual users could email a drop box or other file-sharing link to specific participants, but that again is cumbersome and somewhat prohibits those from lurking/listening from being able to participate. IDEALLY…academic journals would sponsor journal clubs on Twitter and provide a certain number of downloads of the article being discussed during the time frame of the article. Doing so would increase exposure for their article, their journal, and the research. As a JAMA surgery social media web editor, I wonder if you could help motivate JAMA to be innovative in the use of Twitter chats to further disseminate exposure to the journal’s articles by providing a free download to Twitter journal club participants.
What are your thoughts?
JAMA has been very generous, albeit for limited time frames, with allowing us access to the JAMASurgery articles that we discuss for IGSJC; in fact, a priority for us has been for the articles discussed to be free on-line during the weeks surrounding the discussion, and so far all of the involved journals have done so.
And there are discussions I’m part of with JAMA Network re: us sponsoring a tweetchat-style journal club in the future; JAMA Surgery will likely pilot. Stay tuned! (And as usual, we’re having many of the same ideas)
That’s great! And very cool that JAMA surgery has been so generous. Shows that academic journals are beginning to recognize the power of social media.