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?

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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.

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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…

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…

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…

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

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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.

In its blog post to introduce Google+, Google’s Vic Gundotra said the following:

“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.”

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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…

The BMJ Group’s first dedicated palliative and supportive care journal went live online this week, in preparation for the impending launch in April next year. Check out the new blog site here – https://stg-blogs.bmj.com/spcare/ and show your support by following the journal on Twitter and Facebook.

Introducing BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care

BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care is our newest, peer-reviewed journal with international reach. It aims to link many disciplines and specialties throughout the world; promoting an exchange of evidence based research and innovative practice by publishing high quality transitional research, clinical trials, epidemiology, behavioural sciences, health service research, reviews, and comment.

Following the launch in 2011, BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care will be published quarterly in print and continuously online. It will aim to target not only doctors, but different categories of clinician and healthcare workers associated with palliative medicine, specialist or generalist palliative care, supportive care, psychosocial-oncology and end-of-life care.

The journal’s broad scope makes it a relevant and important resource for palliative care specialists, as well as doctors and nurses in medical and surgical specialties including cardiology, gastroenterology, neurology, oncology, paediatrics, primary care, psychiatry, psychology, renal medicine, respiratory medicine.

A world-class editorial team, which will be lead by Dr Bill Noble, Macmillan senior lecturer in palliative medicine at the University of Sheffield and honorary consultant physician in palliative medicine at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will ensure a high standard of practice-changing research and education.

The new BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care website – scheduled to coincide with the first edition – will play an important role in the overall journal and feature all content ahead of print, as well as offering regular news updates, podcasts, blogs, polls, and eventually, interactive educational features.

Look out for more posts and updates on the BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care blog in the build up to the official launch of the journal at COMPASS, April 2011.