28 May, 12 | by BMJ
You may (or may not) have noticed that having blogged every Friday for over 2 years, there was a distinct lack of activity on the BMJ Web Development blog last week. Was I out enjoying the sunshine? Absolutely not. I was in the office researching the best time to disseminate blog posts on social media networks, of course.
11 May, 12 | by BMJ
It’s been a long time in the planning, but we have finally released a whole new group of features in the BMJ learning site.
The ratings, reviews and recommendations project has several factors.
Anyone who has ever been in a meeting discussing improving a website will have heard someone say, “can’t we make it like Amazon?”. We’ve added star ratings, which are displayed at the top on each module intro page.
30 Mar, 12 | by BMJ
A host of journal editors and industry experts descended upon BMA House yesterday to discuss the latest techniques and developments in reader engagement. Highlights included a lively debate on post-publication peer review, an inspiring presentation by Twitter Journal Club founder Natalie Silvey (@silv24), encouraging advice on developing a comprehensive journal web presence by Karim Khan, and predictions for the future of social networking by Tad Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of NEJM.
Given the central theme of social media throughout the day, perhaps the most fitting way to capture the event is by following the surrounding conversation on Twitter. According to TweetReach, the stream below reached in excess of 27,000 users – quite an achievement!
more…
9 Mar, 12 | by BMJ
The image-sharing site Pinterest has enjoyed dramatic growth since its launch in February 2010. The service’s user base has grown rapidly, from 1.6 million visitors in September 2011 to 11.1 million visitors in February 2012. According to comScore, it has become the the “fastest standalone website to surpass the 10 million mark”. Not only does Pinterest drive more traffic to retail sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, it also drives more traffic to blogs than Twitter. Analytics also show that when it comes to engagement, Pinterest is second only to Facebook — its users spend, on average, 89 minutes per month on the social network.
However, there’s still a healthily high percentage of people who have heard nothing about Pinterest. So, what’s all the fuss about? And is it really dominated by images of cute kittens and elaborately conceived cupcakes?
6 Jan, 12 | by BMJ
A new paper is kicking up a storm in the world of altmetrics (a community that seeks to incorporate social coverage in the assessment of scholarly impact). Analysing the relationship between social metrics and more traditional measures, the study by Gunther Eysenbach in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) concludes that highly tweeted papers are more likely to become highly cited.
Not surprisingly, the article, “Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact,” has been tweeted 575 times, and if Eysenbach’s findings prove true, should receive a fair number of citations.
18 Nov, 11 | by BMJ
PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0’), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com). The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…
11 Nov, 11 | by BMJ
Google+ Pages were announced on Monday, allowing companies of all sizes to post updates about themselves and their products or services. Similar to Facebook, people who follow a Google+ Page can comment on or share the company’s posts, creating running conversation threads. However, businesses can also set up Hangouts where they can chat directly with potential customers.
14 Oct, 11 | by BMJ
The Guardian and Independent recently became the first UK newspapers to launch new style Facebook apps. These are a “new class of apps”, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and “have the ability not only to change the way we think about news but have the ability to change the way the whole news industry works”. They encourage “frictionless experiences”, where users opt in once and avoid being repeatedly asked to agree to allow their friends to see which articles they are reading, enabling “realtime serendipity”, as Zuckerberg put it.
“As we worked with different news organisations there were two camps: people that wanted to bring the social experience onto their sites, like Yahoo [News] and the Independent; and those that wanted the social news experience on Facebook, like Guardian, the Washington Post and the Daily,” director of Facebook’s platform partnerships Christian Hernandez stated. more…
2 Sep, 11 | by BMJ
Following the release of Google’s new social feature, we have added Google+1 buttons to all BMJ and specialist journal articles. If you’re unfamiliar with this functionality, it is basically a button similar to the Facebook “like”. When you click +1, you’re publicly recommending pages across the web. You can also use +1 to share with the right circles on Google+ (see more on this below). +1’s can help improve Google Search too, since you can see which pages your social connections have +1’d beneath search results and ads.
Where is it found?
The Google+1 button on our journals can be found in the social bookmarking section of the navigation bar at the side of every article (see screenshot to the left). When you do a Google search you will also see the little +1 button next to each search result. You can then click this button to recommend search listings that you found useful. more…
19 Aug, 11 | by BMJ
In a previous post, we introduced Mendeley, the reference manager and academic social network that’s taking the research world by storm, even scooping an award in the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards. At the time of writing, Mendeley reports that 1,113,597 people have signed up and over 106 million scientific papers have been uploaded. Medicine is a particularly popular discipline, with over 8 million papers and almost 3,000 groups.
Over the past few weeks we have been working with Mendeley to help you better organise your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest medical research. We are in the process of sending Mendeley a complete metadata set, so that full and accurate bibliographic data of all BMJ articles are stored in the Mendeley database. In addition, we have incorporated a ‘web importer’ button across our journals at article-level, so that it takes just one click to add any BMJ paper to your Mendeley library. more…
Keep abreast of the technological developments being implemented on the BMJ journal websites.
