Over the past few weeks, a number of new website features have gone live across the BMJ journal platform. Read below for more details on Scopus citation links, email alerts for specific subspecialities and TOC section RSS feeds. more…

This week BMJ Careers relaunched its website with a fresh new look and improved navigation. The website, which currently has nearly 150,000 users a month, has had a design overhaul to make it easier for people to find medical jobs, educational courses, and careers advice. more…

The BMJ Group’s first dedicated supportive and palliative care journal has launched its new website this month to coincide with the journal’s official release at the COMPASS conference in Edinburgh.

BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care is an important resource for clinicians, researchers and other healthcare workers in all areas where supportive and palliative care is practiced. Published quarterly in print and continuously online, the journal aims to stimulate collaboration between healthcare professionals in different specialities by providing high quality, clinically relevant research, reviews, commentaries, information and news of international importance. more…

Recently crowned winner of the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards in the education, recruitment and jobs category, Mendeley, a research collaboration tool, has enjoyed a good deal of coverage in the press. It’s often referred to as “a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science” and  Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, was even reported to have said that if they got it right, they could change the face of science. more…

With users increasingly viewing articles as ‘portals to greater information’, BMJ Group has introduced a new collaboration with ISI Web of Science, the multidisciplinary bibliographic database tool. All of our journal articles now include the exact number of citations for each article being viewed, as well as a direct link to the list of citing articles on ISI Web of Science. Have a look at the screenshot below, which displays the exact location of these ‘Citing article via Web of Science’ links at article-level. more…

A chunk of our working week is now devoted to preparing the latest BMJ iPad edition so its appearance in the iTunes app store coincides with the thud of the print issue as it lands on subscribers’ mats. I thought I’d use this blog to explain how our processes have changed to accommodate our new product, and to gauge interest in seeing the BMJ on other e-reader/mobile devices.

But first, some history. The BMJ iPad app launched in early 2011. We are the first general medical journal on Apple’s tablet computer, and our focus was to respond to a wish from some international subscribers to get a sense of what the print issue looks like each week.We’ve been delighted with the feedback to date, particularly with the interest shown by BMA members. When we developed the app we assumed (wrongly, as it turned out), that interest from UK doctors would be limited. After all, most get the BMJ print and online as a BMA membership benefit. So our focus was getting the app live, rather than investigating ways of offering it free to members. The BMA is now offering it for free. You can find out more by reading these FAQs.

I’ve talked a lot about print, but our focus throughout was to make the app genuinely interactive, and it is this which takes up our time each week.

The print issue goes to press on Tuesdays, but many of the pages (research, practice, etc) are ready by Monday. So we meet to discuss what archive links to add to the iPad pages. These are the kind of connections we tend to make:

• If an article is already online it may have attracted some commments, so we often find an interesting one to link to,
• Other articles by the same author,
• Previous articles in a series,
• A relevant blog, podcast, or video,
• A discussion on doc2doc, BMJ Group’s global clinical community

On Wednesdays, after the print issue has gone to press, we select images for the iPad and ensure they are the right format and size for the device. We then insert all the links we identified on Monday via a content management system, and quality assure the finished product on a test server before getting the issue live by Friday. This usually entails ensuring that links work that images look OK. News, blogs, podcasts, and videos are updated via a live feed, so they bypass the above process, but an end users always sees the latest each time they log in via a web or wifi connection.

The whole process now runs pretty seamlessly, so I imagine we will very soon consider if we want the BMJ on other mobile/e-reader devices. The iPad project means we had to stall our discussions on iPhone apps, or ones for othe mobile platforms. How might we cut the content cake for a phone app? We could, for instance, launch separate ones for news, education, research, and comment. Or we could be more creative and combine content from across BMJ Group products, adopting a similar approach as we have for specialty portals (see my previous blog). Amazon’s Kindle often gets talked about. Perhaps that’s a logical next step for us. It would be great to get your feedback.

David Payne is editor, bmj.com

BMJ Journals offer users a variety of options to organise their site experience for maximum personal efficiency. These functions are freely available to individual members/subscribers and to registered users.

My folders
‘My folders’ is a personalised online filing system for registered users. The ‘My folders’ feature lets you add particular papers to a personal archive that you can revisit later. You can create subfolders within your personal archive area that let you organise articles by topic, discipline, author, or any other categorisation that strikes your fancy.  Articles can be re-organised at any time, according to your needs. You can easily save them to more than one folder by using the copy function.

To start using folders, just click the new ‘My folders’ button on the right-hand side of any page (underneath Email alerts, Twitter and Facebook) or select “Add article to my folders” from an article view (see screenshot below).

Saved searches
Also within the ‘My folder’ area is the ‘Saved searches’ functionality, which allows you to save a particular search query for use later on, and organise the saved searches within your personal folder hierarchy. Just click the ‘Save this search to my folders’ button on any search result (see screenshot below). 

Managing your folders
Entering your registered username and password after clicking on the ‘My folders’ button will enable you to use the folders service at any time. Articles can be re-organised according to your needs, by creating new folders and moving or copying articles around. Please note that the folders work across all BMJ Journals, so you can save articles from multiple titles.

When we notice something in the real world that we’d like more information about, it’s no longer necessary to make a mental note to look it up later on Google. We can simply point our smartphone at the object and obtain the desired effect without typing or speaking. The Quick Response (QR) code is said to offer the quickest and easiest link between curiosity and information retrieval and its value is recognised by businesses and consumers alike.

How do they work?
If you’re not yet familiar with Quick Response codes, they’re akin to the ubiquitous barcodes used by retailers to track inventory and price products at the point of sale. The key difference is that QR codes store a much larger amount of data, including URL links, geographic coordinates and text. While  still considered a novelty in many places, QR codes have been actively used for over a decade in Japan where they were invented.

When users scan or read a QR code with their iPhone, Android or other camera-enabled Smartphone, they can link to digital content on the web; activate a number of phone functions including email, IM and SMS; and connect their mobile device to a web browser.

Where are they being used?
QR codes are becoming more prevalent in marketing circles and have been integrated into both traditional and interactive campaigns across the globe. Media where QR codes have been deployed include: billboard ads  (see a recent Calvin Klein campaign), websites, email marketing, business cards, print ads, guerilla marketing campaigns, event ticketing and tracking, in-store displays, trade-show management, contests, direct mail campaigns and couponing just to name a few. See more novel uses of QR codes below:

• United Airlines – Many of the major airlines are now using 2D codes as digital boarding passes.  By the end of 2011, it has been reported that all carriers will be required to provide this service for international flights.

• Geo-based reviews and tours – A pilot program between CitySearch and Antenna Audio began in Spring 2008. Reviews and audio snippets were embedded into codes on San Francisco historical landmarks and restaurants. Foodies and tourists enjoyed self-guided tours of the Bay.
• Ralph Lauren interactive windows – These allow users to purchase items when the shops are closed. Consumers pass by, see something they like, scan the QR code by a particular product and are instantly taken to the relevant product on their site. This uses two trends perfectly : QR codes and mobile commerce.

The future
What’s most exciting is how QR codes take what social media is doing well now (bringing people together with technology) and extend it to enhance that experience. The next generation of barcodes will hold even more information – so much that an Internet connection will not even be necessary.  The content will be effectively embedded in the code. Imagine scanning a digital code to manifest physical reality?

Try it for yourself!

1. Download a QR reader from your handset’s app store.
2. Hold your smartphone over the code shown below.
3. You will then be forwarded to the BMJ blog homepage!

The bmj.com topics page is one of the site’s top 20 most visited pages, linking to 290 collections of clinical and non-clinical topics. Each one is powered by tagging tool called Semio, which trawls articles for keywords and then attaches that article to one or more collections. Visitors to the site can sign up for specialty-specific email alerts. So a psychiatrist, for example, can receive email alerts every time an article is posted about mental health.

Some of these clinical collection pages were revamped recently and now pull in not only BMJ articles but also relevant content from BMJ Group’s 39 specialist journals. There are also links to the latest jobs in that specialty (pulled from BMJ Careers), plus BMJ Learning modules and discussions from doc2doc, BMJ Group’s clinical community for doctors worldwide.

We’ve called these new pages “specialty portals,” and launched with oncology, diabetes,  and psychiatry. Their design is slightly different from the standard bmj.com topic collection pages, and we were pleased to attract sponsorship for the diabetes portal, which is currently supported by an unrestricted grant from Novonordisk.

As the diabetes portal makes clear, the company has no influence on the editorial content displayed, but you do, by giving us your feedback on the portals we’ve launched so far, via this blog.

Semio is an automated tool and replaced the manual tagging we used to use each time an article was posted on bmj.com. Manual tagging was very time-consuming and quite subjective. We’re continually refining Semio to ensure the content displayed is relevant to diabetologists, psychiatrists, and oncologists (plus anyone with an interest in these three clinical areas). If we restrict Semio too much on the diabetes portal, for example, we risk excluding articles that perhaps mention diabetes alongside other chronic conditions. If we apply very loose tagging rules, we could end up with a list of headlines that fail even to mention diabetes and risk confusing visitors to this page. We plan to introduce some manual “over-rides” in the near future, and to involve practising clinicians as portal
editors. These can advise on which articles to exclude, perhaps write a blog on latest developments in their clinical specialty, and participate in clinical discussions on doc2doc.

The other issue is recency versus relevance. Websites that update regularly tend to attract more visitors. The dilemma this presents is how to ensure a very relevant paper that could be months or even years old still shows on the portal. To address this, we have five manually added “Top 5” articles from across BMJ Group. Again, give us your feedback on this selection. You may think other articles should be in there. Perhaps the diabetes podcast we produced last month should be there? Let us know.

Both the topic collections and specialty portals are bmj.com pages, and they will undergo further changes later this year when the site redesign goes live. We plan to colour code them, and to highlight them more prominently from relevant articles. So a BMJ research paper about cancer, for example, will have a colour coded link to the oncology portal showing at the top, plus any other relevant topic collection links.

Portals, of course, are just one way of clustering content online, and Semio is just one tool out there. Some sites suit the “handpicked” approach better. The portal for junior doctors is a good example of this. Each week my colleague Helen Macdonald (a GP trainee and BMJ assistant editor) looks at what’s been published across the Group and suggests some links for our junior doctor portal (although there is some automation also). A similar approach is used for the site we set up to highlight the NHS reforms in England, and the one we developed three years ago to mark the 60th
anniversary of the NHS.

Again, we’d be interested in your feedback. Should our portals include feeds to content from other sites, for instance? And although 290 collection pages sound like a lot, are we missing any?

David Payne, editor of bmj.com

The annual Technology for Marketing and Advertising exhibition took place this week at London’s Earls Court, bringing together some of the UK’s leading Internet marketing innovators. Amongst more than 200 exhibitors, keynote speakers included Facebook’s UK commercial director, Stephen Haines, and Nic Cumisky, Google’s Senior Industry Manager.

Impressive statistics

The keynote speeches were dominated by startling statistics.

• 124 years of Angry Birds are played every week.
• 40 % of all Tweets are from mobile devices.
• There were 2.4 billion UK internet visits to social networks in January 2011.
• Facebook is now the second most visited site in UK (after Google) – every 6th page viewed in the UK is on Facebook.
• On Christmas Day 2010, Facebook traffic exceeded Google traffic for the first time ever.
• On average, we pass 3,254 pieces of personal information into databases each week.

Interesting trends

Microsoft and Experian teamed up to discuss a number of trends that are sweeping the online realm. Social networking users have now surpassed email users. Demographically, younger internet users often only use email when communicating with adults. When speaking with their peers, they prefer to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Robin Goad from Experian Hitwise (a proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyse website logs created on their network) revealed clear profiling patterns in social media usage. By cross-referencing this information with Experian’s Mosaic consumer classification data, they were able to identify a trend for more affluent members of society to use Twitter, whereas Facebook is much more mainstream and skews towards the upper working class.

Emerging technologies to keep an eye on

• NFC (Near Field Communication) chips were described by Google as ‘bluetooth on steroids’. NFC allows a device, usually a mobile phone, to collect data from another device or NFC tag at close range. In many ways, it’s like a contactless payment card that is integrated into a phone. In other ways, it’s similar to Bluetooth, except that instead of programming two devices to work together, they can simply touch to establish a connection.
• QR codes can be scanned and read by anyone with a smartphone, just by clicking their camera. By scanning the codes, you can access images, websites and text. QR codes allow for more data than the standard 10-digit bar code and scanning requires less effort than typing a URL. Click here to view some novel uses of this technology.
• i-Ads – AXA have recently released the first i-Ad, which integrates newspaper advertising with an iPhone. The video below explains the process in more detail, but the gist is that you come upon an engaging picture in print and are asked to place your iPhone on a blank space on the page which brings the story to life, and keeps eyeballs on the i-Ad for a full minute.

• Third life – It is becoming increasingly hard to determine what is offline and online. Google and many others are in the process of seamlessly combining the real world and the online world into something entirely different. Industry experts predict that we will soon experience an indistinguishable mashing of our real physical first life and our second virtual life into a ‘Third Life’. Both General Motors and Ford are integrating augmented reality technology into their windshields so that GPS directions will be layered on to the road in front of you, along with directions to your local Burger King or HSBC branch. A car has even been released with voice-activated Facebook newsfeed updates: watch a demonstration in the advert below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seKnxwzF2DU