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May saw the launch ofBMJ Portfolio. This is actually something of a radical new step for BMJ Group – the first website we’ve launched with no content. Instead, it’s a tool doctors can use for recording their own needs, activities and notes relating to keeping up to date with medicine – continual professional development, or CPD, as it’s known. Why would doctors use BMJ Portfolio rather than the back of an envelope or an Excel spreadsheet?
A junior doctor in the West Midlands and a medical student at Cambridge University have kicked off a new movement in the medical community by launching the first ever Twitter Journal Club. Heralded as a ‘revolution’ in scientific communication, it has enjoyed positive coverage from publishers and practitioners alike (e.g it was mentioned today at the ASME Annual Scientific Meeting). Now in its seventh week, the initiative has amassed over 950 followers on Twitter and last Sunday generated 448 tweets during a discussion of the following BMJ paper: Effect of β blockers in treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a retrospective cohort study
Google is taking yet another stab at social networking with Google+ after the past disappointments of Buzz and Wave. This time, however, they have launched a more polished product than usual and offer a solution to the problem of keeping one’s personal and work life separate. The interface and concepts are cleaner and simpler, which will make it easier for early adopters to engage, use and then share their experiences.
“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”
doc2doc.bmj.com, BMJ Group’s global professional online community for doctors, has been running for two and a half years now. In this time, under editors Luisa Dillner (head of BMJ New Product Development) and David Payne (editor of bmj.com), the community has thrived. There are now more than 45k members from all over the world and the site gets 60-70k page views a month.
Online polls have become a staple of the Internet; a very common feature used by all types of web sites. Polls can be found at the end of articles, as complements to blog posts and sometimes comprise the sole content of a web site. Sites featuring the most glib content to the most serious news stories will include online polls and online poll results, making the feature one of the most ubiquitous on the World Wide Web.
In an attempt to increase the interactivity of our sites, online polls have been implemented on a number of our journals. They are located on the right hand side of every page except the homepage (see the screenshot below). The questions asked vary from those related to specific articles in the journal to requests for feedback on additional features (see the question currently live on ADC to the left). These questions will rotate on a monthly basis and will give us an invaluable insight into the opinions of our readers.
The following questions are currently live on the journal sites. To share your opinion, simply click on a link below, read the accompanying article and then cast your vote in the online poll which is located on the right-hand side of your screen. more…
Following the release of the BJSM blog on Kindle, BMJ Group has now published content from a number of other specialist blogs and journals on the Kindle platform. Actual journal content is now fed through to Kindle from our ‘Online First’ sections. These articles have been peer reviewed, accepted for publication, published online and indexed by PubMed but have not yet been assigned to a journal issue.
Amazon recently announced that it now sells more copies of its Kindle ebooks than traditional paperbacks. The online retailer revealed that paid-for sales of the electronic format outstrip its total sales of paperbacks.
Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books.
A key feature of the new manuscript submission system being used by the BMJ Journals is its connected functionality with other Thomson Reuters products, namely Web of Science and EndNote. Through Optima, authors can create their manuscript in EndNote and seamlessly submit it for review using ScholarOne. Its integration with Web of Science also means that reviewers and editors have one-click access from the manuscripts to the times cited, related records, and links to the full record files, allowing for a well-organised and proficient reviewing process.
Authors can upload their manuscripts from EndNote directly onto the submission system
Google started rolling out the ‘+1’ recommend button across its own portfolio and third-party web sites just a day after Twitter unveiled its new ‘follow’ button. Both releases are being viewed as direct competitors to Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button.
Central to an effort by companies to stake out their claim in the social-networking domain and encourage ordinary ‘surfers’ to be more engaged with their products, the tools also facilitate the collection of detailed user behaviour data and have obvious benefits for online advertising. The suite of Web 2.0 buttons featured on most websites has grown steadily over the past few years (you may well have noticed) and sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are long-term residents. But the success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has spurred others to get in on the game. Afterall, it is said to appear on more than a third of the 1,000 most popular websites and apparently the average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic. more…
There has been a movement in the STM community to offer relevant metrics at article-level to help users determine the value and quality of research. This data provides additional context to a paper and consequently the BMJ journals have implemented online usage statistics in addition to the recent introduction of links to third-party citation measuring services. more…
My blog about the iPad last month generated some interest, and this update outlines some of the feedback we’ve had to date. The move to make the app free to BMA members has generated some very positive reviews on the iTunes app store. We’d already had some nice comments about the app’s technical functionality, but the pricing issue led to a fair number of 1* ratings. more…
Authors can upload their manuscripts from EndNote directly onto the submission system
Google started rolling out the ‘+1’ recommend button across its own portfolio and third-party web sites just a day after Twitter unveiled its new ‘follow’ button. Both releases are being viewed as direct competitors to Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button.
