Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

I recently looked at whether scientific journals are using social media – particularly medical and pain journals – and presented what I found at the recent Australian Pain Society conference. Here’s a version of that presentation. Before looking at what the study found it might be useful to define what social media is. Wikipedia came up with:

‘Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. It is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue’

What does that mean? I would suggest social media is a way to reach a specific audience, like researchers and clinicians with targeted information on a variety of platforms such as twitter, or facebook or youtube, or blogs through different devices (laptop, mobile phones, tablets).  Why is this relevant to research journals?

A recent paper in Nature talks about the fact that researchers are undergoing trial by twitter ‘Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.’ It potentially represents shift in the way we communicate and disseminate research. It lead me to wonder whether Scientific journals are using social media? Does social media have any relevance for dissemination of research and clinical practice?

The background to this study is that we know that the application of evidence based medicine to clinical practice obligates us to keep up to date with research progress. Journals are the most important means of doing that, but rely on their audience ‘pulling’ relevant findings from the wider pool of literature.  The role of social media in connecting information to users presents an opportunity for journals to ‘push’ the relevant findings to their audience in a targeted and time-efficient manner.

The aim of this study was to determine the use of social media by medical and pain  journals to ascertain whether they had a SM presence, if they did, how they used it, (participation), and whether they hand any influence.  What did we do?  We selected the top 10 general medical and the top six pain-focussed journals according to their impact factor. Whether those journals had a social media presence of a blog, facebook, YouTube or twitter streams was determined by Google search as well as searching on Journal websites individually, and separately on facebook, youtube and twitter.

Why did we chose these platforms? Nielsen indicates that facebook, youtube and  twitter are the three main social media platforms used, and these are often linked to a blog.  For participation in social media we counted the number of posts over a one month period (Jan 2011) and for influence we used hubspot’s twitter and facebook grader to provide a measure of how the social media presence might be ranked.  We did not have an algorithm to measure YouTube influence and simply noted presence for this social media site.

What did we find? Several high-impact general medical journals had a strong social media presence, 9 out of the 10 had twitter accounts that were regularly participated in.  For example the BMJ has a twitter account, and posted 81 times in the month of January and has 97.6 percent influence.  Influence was measured in a number of ways based on number of posts, interactions, number of times the information was shared as well as follower/following ratio.

What else did we find?  Eight out of 10 top medical journals had facebook accounts and 5 out of 10 had a blog, but only 3 had a YouTube account.  Looking at the data it would be interesting to do a correlation to see if a higher impact factor corresponds with greater social media presence.

What did we find with pain journals? One brave soul – Molecular pain, had a twitter account.  However, I would be hesitant in calling this a presence, on closer examination of their twitter account they have no logo, no url to direct followers back to the website and only one post in January (the second was in April – so clearly there is no dialogue or regular posting to followers). In contrast you can see some the medical journals with an active twitter presence – in this case here you can see NEJM, the Lancet and PLoS on twitter, facebook and blog pages.

What can we conclude? The top general medical journals use social media to disseminate their content. By so doing, they push their information to thousands of audience members each week. In contrast, pain-focussed journals have no social media presence and as such miss out on this opportunity.

However, the impact of social media-based dissemination on clinical practice remains to be investigated, but these preliminary data suggest that social media could be better used to disseminate new findings in the pain sciences.

A twitter conversation as to merits of using social media for high value journals took place recently.  High value as in top medical journals in the world, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM. I have no idea of their subscription rate, but would venture a guess at a gazillion.

This conversation centered around accessibility of articles – free articles (also known as open access) means they can be shared, whereas subscription articles, means that the journal makes money but only subscribers can read them.

The story goes like this: A bunch of juicy looking articles come up in my email – one set  is from the Scientific American Journal Mind (part of the Nature group of journals now – Nature also being highly esteemed in research circles), the other is NEJM.

I click on Scientific American and get a bunch of  ‘accessed denied’ ‘log in’ ‘subscribe’ rude messages to each and every article I click.  The shame of it is, I would have shared it to a twitter and facebook network – mine and a research network, Body in Mind. They would have had double whammy exposure.  But I couldn’t access them, so I didn’t share.

Then I read NEJM articles – the first two articles I clicked were both open access. I read. I shared.

Here’s the clever bit -and what they are currently navigating – they have a subscription model (they still need to make money to run the journal) and they have open articles, using social media to enable us to share.  BUT, not all to the full advantage. The better the use of social media, the greater their exposure, the greater their chance of more subscriptions.

Discussing this conversation recently with a Journals Publisher at Elsevier this is a big deal at the moment in journals publishing. So, for publishers especially, this twitter conversation is worth a squizz, it is between me and @DrVes – an advisor to NEJM, amongst other things, blogger, expert user of social media in a clinical and research context. At his suggestion I have gathered the tweets. NEJM do some things well, some things poorly, and some almost a criminal waste of opportunity to share their expertise. (in the tweets below SM = social media)

and so I did go to the NEJM facebook page to see if they had interacted with any of the people who had commented on the facebook page. Each link they post generates a shed load of comments by readers (seriously, loads). To my utter surprise there were no replies from the NEJM.

Go on @NEJM – do some podcasts, blogging, real time social media.  Please.

August 2009

A conversation with a friend, casually pondering the benefits of an outlet for some of his clinical research.  ‘You’re a good communicator, you could do a blog’ says I. ‘OK’ was the response (clinical scientists being people of few words).

That afternoon I got home, tinkered around, and set up said blog.  ‘Voila’ says I. ‘Nice’ came the response. Articles were emailed, I put them on the blog, set up some social media accounts. Life continued.

January 2010

The research team grew, articles were found that were interesting and lead authors invited to write about what they were doing in every day language, a personal blog is now a ‘clinical research blog’. I started to come into the office to run the blog, the Institute became aware of what was happening, and the posts and networks trundled along.

April 2010

Undergrad students joined the team and as part of their research were invited to write about what they were doing. A ‘clinical research blog’ is now a ‘laboratory blog’.

August 2010

One year anniversary celebrated with cake at the lab team meeting. Blog, facebook, twitter… a veritable feast of interconnectivity and networks. We defined more clearly what we were doing and why. ‘I’ is now most definitely ‘we’.

September 2010

The research institute team page needs updating. What do I call myself? The team consists of a Senior Research Fellow to undergraduate students. ‘Digital strategist’ just doesn’t seem to fit.

I ruminate on a journey that all started from a casual conversation one year ago. Whose blog is it now?

I was asked by a clinical researcher today what the point was of social media. To put this in context, this is about site that I set up 10 months ago, in a niche area of neuroscience research. The blog now has a steady 4000 unique visitors a month, 7000 page views all through the use of social media. The point may seem obvious, except it was the owner of the site who was asking me.

I was about to trot off the stats in order to justify my existence but then thought, he’s right. Can I really measure the effect? Can I provide evidence-based results that shows that those 4000 visitors have had a positive impact from visiting the blog, and that it has improved their clinical practice?

I can provide readership stats, but clinical impact. Nope.

“How do you trust what you’re reading is quality?”  “When does quality become quality?” These are recurring themes encountered with regard to some of the websites that offer free content. However, aggregator sites gather content of a certain standard or type which may offer an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of peer review or defining quality.

Academic Earth

This is an excellent new educational resource which gathers video lectures from leading Universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.  Lectures are free to use and download and there is plan to include social features for users.  As an example:

Private Equity and the Financial Crisis — Yale University lecture by Stephen Schwarzman Co-Founder of Blackstone Group

For a more detailed description on Academic Earth see also Life in the Fast lane’s Academic Earth Open Source Lecture Series.

Science Blogs

This site features bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines and only includes those posts which have reached a high academic standard. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs claims to have the largest online community dedicated to science.

Research Blogging

Research Blogging  automatically aggregates only blog posts about peer-reviewed research, many of which appear in Science Blogs and can be recognized by the green tick telling reader they are reading a blog on peer reviewed research.  If you don’t know this site I can highly recommend having a look – topics covered range from Computer Science to Psychology.

YouTube EDU

Newly launched, YouTubeEdu collects all the educational content being uploaded on YouTube by Colleges and Universities.  However, in this case there is no guarantee being made of educational quality and the standards will undoubtedly vary but it is another excellent resource.

Universities providing free content

Although not aggregator sites as such, it is probable that top Universities offering content on a variety of subjects will have reached a certain standard.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to providing OpenCourseWare recently opted to publish their research articles free online (in addition to sending them to journals for publication) in order to give greater access to the university’s scholarship. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have also decided on a similar policy.  The Education Portal lists some of the best free online University courses available.
Overall, does content go through as rigorous a review process compared with more traditional routes – maybe, maybe not. There are new ideas like GPeerReview being developed, however, for sites such as Academic Earth, ScienceBlogs, or MIT to be able to continue to draw traffic by virtue of hosting only the best means they must ensure that content meets their standards – much in the same way as happens in the more traditional routes of peer review.

For more information on the role of blogs as institutional educational tools which also tackles the issue of quality control very well see an article published by PLoS Biol: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.