This month on Twitter

Social media in surgery: evolving role in research communication and beyond

PURPOSE

To present social media (SoMe) platforms for surgeons, how these are used, with what impact, and their roles for research communication.

METHODS

A narrative review based on a literature search regarding social media use, of studies and findings pertaining to surgical disciplines, and the authors' own experience.

RESULTS

Several social networking platforms for surgeons are presented to the reader. The more frequently used, i.e., Twitter, is presented with details of opportunities, specific fora for communication, presenting tips for effective use, and also some caveats to use. Details of how the surgical community evolved through the use of the hashtag #SoMe4Surgery are presented. The impact on gender diversity in surgery through important hashtags (from #ILookLikeASurgeon to #MedBikini) is discussed. Practical tips on generating tweets and use of visual abstracts are presented, with influence on post-production distribution of journal articles through "tweetorials" and "tweetchats." Findings from seminal studies on SoMe and the impact on traditional metrics (regular citations) and alternative metrics (Altmetrics, including tweets, retweets, news outlet mentions) are presented. Some concerns on misuse and SoMe caveats are discussed.

CONCLUSION

Over the last two decades, social media has had a huge impact on science dissemination, journal article discussions, and presentation of conference news. Immediate and real-time presentation of studies, articles, or presentations has flattened hierarchy for participation, debate, and engagement. Surgeons should learn how to use novel communication technology to advance the field and further professional and public interaction.

Impact of Randomized Controlled Trials in the Social Media: Does Science Trend As Much As Everyday Events?

BACKGROUND

The approach to the scientific literature is evolving. Currently, dissemination of articles happens in real time through social media (SoMe) channels, and little is known about its impact in medicine. The aim of this study was to investigate if SoMe dissemination followed trends independent from articles type and content.

METHODS

First, the SoMe engagement of a popular theme (#BlackFriday) and a relevant theme (#ClimateChange) was compared using a SoMe analytic tool to test if the popular theme would reach more engagement. In a second analysis, themes in colorectal surgery in the SoMe community were explored. Altmetric Explorer was searched for the term "colorectal surgery" and the outputs were categorized into 'randomized controlled trials' (RCTs) and 'other studies'. Subgroups were compared for the Altmetric scores using statistical analyses.

RESULTS

The analytic tool documented that #BlackFriday outnumbered #ClimateChange in mentions and engagement (1.6 million vs 127.000 mentions). Following, Altmetric Explorer identified 1381 articles, including 92 RCTs (7.1%). Overall, 25,554 mentions were documented from 1205 outputs (97.0% by Twitter). A greater percentage of "other studies" ranked in the lower Altmetric score categories (p = 0.0007). Similarly, the median Altmetric score was higher in the RCT subgroup comparing with "other studies" (6.5 vs. 2.0, Mann-Whitney p = 0.0001).

CONCLUSIONS

In this study, RCTs represented just the 7.1% of the studies and produced 11% of Twitter outputs. The median Altmetric scores obtained by RCTs were higher than those of other studies.