A little while ago I was interviewed about the work I do at BodyinMind.org. This is a website that writes about pain research. We started it just over 2 years ago, and now have over 9,000 unique visitors every month from over 100 countries. That’s great you might think, but there is still the ‘So What’ factor. Is this actually making any difference? The jury is still out and we are trying very hard to measure whether what we are doing makes any difference at all to pain research or clinical practice.
FindTheBest is an objective comparison search engine that allows people to choose a topic, compare options and decide what’s best for them. FindTheBest is organized into nine broad categories including Health and each listing can be sorted by numerous key filters (have a look at the left hand side of the image below). It’s not bad!
So what does that mean in practice? I had a look at health, specifically Life Span Expectancy and Mortality rates and it gave me the results for each and every age so I could compare. So, hypothetically speaking, looking at the category of: female, age: 42. It told me that statistically speaking a woman aged 42 has a 0.17% chance of dying and 39.57 more years to live. I compared this with stats for 20 years further on when, at age 62, she has a 0.89% chance of dying and 22 more years to live:
The take home message? This hypothetical female has passed the half way mark and has decided to eat more bananas and exercise a great deal.
Thanks to @DrVes for the spot and for the blogging tip!
Using social media in clinical practice covers a big spectrum, from attacting certain clients (marketing) to getting the message out about what you do (content distribution) to keeping up to date with what is happening in your area. The previous post focused on how to use social media in practice to get your professional profile online, this post focuses on how to keep up to date.
Credit: www.CoxandForkum.com
Keeping up with research using social media
There are many sites which put out new research and information on a regular basis, for example ‘Neuroscience and pain science for manual physical therapists’[1], which is run by a Canadian physiotherapist Diane Jacobs, or ‘Body in Mind’[2], which is run by a clinical science research team at Neuroscience Research Australia. Other sites, such as Research Blogging[3] or Science blogs[4] do the aggregating and sifting of other sites for you and you choose the topics in which you are interested. Public Facebook pages can be read without joining Facebook and one can consider such sites as a bit like a public newspaper, only free.
If you want to tap into social media networks with your own site, work out who your site is for – clinicians, researchers, Joe public – and then tap into the relevant social networks. in this case the primary goal might be dissemination of information. Again, virtual networks eventually convert to physical networks as people communicate and spread the word. Or, as Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis said:
‘Our experience of the world depends on the architecture of the ties around us, it depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we are residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network.’[5].
“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 sitesgather 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.
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:
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 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 toPsychology.
Newly launched, YouTubeEdu collects all the educational content being uploaded onYouTube 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 GPeerReviewbeing 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.
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