{"id":30996,"date":"2014-01-28T12:46:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T11:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=30996"},"modified":"2014-02-05T15:36:16","modified_gmt":"2014-02-05T14:36:16","slug":"trish-groves-is-twitter-any-use-for-two-handed-debates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2014\/01\/28\/trish-groves-is-twitter-any-use-for-two-handed-debates\/","title":{"rendered":"Trish Groves: Is Twitter any use for two handed debates?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/01\/trish_groves.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-30997\" alt=\"trish_groves\" src=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/01\/trish_groves-150x115.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"115\" \/><\/a>&#8220;Jeez, this is a bit like having a serious conversation on top of a mountain fifteen yards apart in 90mph winds,&#8221; tweeted doctor and journalist Ben Goldacre (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/bengoldacre\">@bengoldacre<\/a>). &#8220;Yes, and I&#8217;m a lousy typist to boot!&#8221; hollered back Randy Schekman, Nobel laureate and editor of open access journal eLife (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/elife\">@elife<\/a>). They were attempting a debate on Twitter (#benandrandy) about scientific publishing, following Professor Shekman&#8217;s provocative assertion that &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2013\/dec\/09\/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science\">science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals<\/a>.&#8221; It did work, sort of, and other tweeters joined in. <em>E-life<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/storify.com\/elifesciences\/benandrandy\"> summed it up later using Storify<\/a>, an app that gives you a blank sheet and a feed of tweets, facebook posts, and other links to curate into a linear account; a story. <!--more--> A week or so later Richard Smith (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/@Richard56\">@Richard56<\/a>) and I (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/@trished\">@trished<\/a>) gave it a go, in a live Twitter debate about our recent Head to Head article: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/348\/bmj.g171\">Should journals stop publishing research funded by the drug industry?<\/a> Like all <em>BMJ<\/em> Head to Heads, this had been commissioned as two independent halves, with Richard Smith and Peter C G\u00f8tzsche saying yes and me saying no, but no direct to-and-fro between us. <em>BMJ<\/em> readers had pitched in, with some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/348\/bmj.g171?tab=responses\">great Rapid Responses<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/podcast\/2014\/01\/15\/should-journals-stop-publishing-research-funded-drug-industry\">3000 downloads of the linked podcast<\/a>, and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/about-bmj\/poll-archive\">close run poll\u2014<\/a>786 readers (55%) voted for medical journals to stop publishing research funded by the drug industry. The article got tweeted widely on publication, and it continues to reach thousands of readers as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.altmetric.com\/details.php?key=d4500d74dc48165f41e2952bd2b4e599&amp;citation_id=2042220&amp;embedded=true\">Altmetrics<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/348\/bmj.g171?tab=metrics\">bmj.com download data<\/a> show. So would a live Twitter debate between the authors help to tease out the arguments, and would we manage to organise the chaos? Here&#8217;s how we ran it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The published article and <em>BMJ<\/em> podcast included the footnote: &#8220;Join the authors live on Twitter to debate the issue on 21 January, 1200-1230 GMT at #pharmaban.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Richard Smith and I both tweeted the article&#8217;s link and #pharmaban a couple of times in the days leading up to the Twitter debate.<\/li>\n<li>an hour or so before the start of the Twitter debate Richard and I both drafted and saved tweets each giving the three main points of our opposing views.<\/li>\n<li>I drafted a few tweets to send just before the debate\u2014linking to the article; linking to the Rapid Responses on bmj.com; and explaining the rules of engagement\u2014and I tweeted these just before noon.<\/li>\n<li>at noon Richard sent his three preloaded tweets giving main point, then I tweeted mine. Then the free debate opened.<\/li>\n<li>at 12.30 Richard and I stopped, although a few people continued to debate without us.<\/li>\n<li>by serendipity, our Twitter debate coincided with the lunch break at the annual European conference of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ismpp.org\/european-meeting\">International Society for Medical Publication Professionals ISMPP<\/a>. We learned about this via a tweet a few days before the debate, and sent a pile of pdfs of the article to the BMJ\/BMJ Open booth at the conference. Many ISMPP delegates joined in.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s our <a href=\"http:\/\/storify.com\/trished\/should-journals-stop-publishing-research-by-the-dr\">Storify summary of the debate<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Did it work? And should the <em>BMJ<\/em> make Twitter debates a regular feature, at least for Head to Heads? <em><strong>Trish Groves<\/strong>, head of research, The BMJ<\/em>. Twitter <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/trished\">@trished<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Jeez, this is a bit like having a serious conversation on top of a mountain fifteen yards apart in 90mph winds,&#8221; tweeted doctor and journalist Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre). &#8220;Yes, and I&#8217;m a lousy typist to boot!&#8221; hollered back Randy Schekman, Nobel laureate and editor of open access journal eLife (@elife). They were attempting a debate [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2014\/01\/28\/trish-groves-is-twitter-any-use-for-two-handed-debates\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editors-at-large"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}