Tag Archive for: BJUI

You are here: / BJUI

Posts

Social media @BJUIjournal: what a start!

/5 Comments/by

When Prokar Dasgupta assumed the role of new Editor-in-Chief of the BJUI in January 2013, he outlined his vision and some of the major changes that the Journal would make as it transitioned to a new editorial team. After ten years of progress under Professor John Fitzpatrick, it was clear that we are now working in a much-changed publishing landscape, one that will change even more in the next few years. In particular, the way in which medical professionals receive information and interact with colleagues, patients, journals and other professional groups is unrecognizable from what it was just two or three years ago.

Social media is the driver of much of this change. It has transformed the way in which the current generation of trainees interact – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Urban Spoon, Expedia, Trip Advisor, Instagram – all of these platforms are key conduits for how Generation Z experiences life. This generation will find the idea of a printed journal arriving in the post every month to be anathema. In a world with an ever-increasing amount of content being produced, and much competition for our limited attention span, Gen Z live their lives through mobile platforms capable of delivering the precise content they want, immediately to their devices. Not just that, this content, whether that be breaking news via Twitter, friend status updates on Facebook, job opportunities via LinkedIn, is delivered through vibrant media that allows them to engage and respond by liking, sharing, favourite-ing, re-tweeting and commenting even as the content reaches them. All of this activity is done through convenient and increasingly pervasive mobile platforms while on the train to work, while queuing for a coffee, between cases in theatre, during a lecture, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Gen Z will not seek out this type of content – it will seek them out and be delivered straight to their timeline/twitter-feed.

My role as Associate Editor (Social Media) at BJUI, has been to devise and implement a strategy to ensure that the BJUI evolves in this new world – to ensure that the next generation of trainees find us a meaningful organization to engage with and be informed, educated and entertained by. My fellow Associate Editors, Dr Matt Bultitude (Website), Dr Ben Challacombe (Innovation) and Dr Quoc-Dien Trinh (Health Services Research), play important roles here as do our publishers, our Executive team and Editor-in-Chief at BJUI.

So what have we done? If you are on Twitter or Facebook you will have noticed that BJUI has come to life on these key social media platforms.

 

Since 1st January, our followers on Twitter have grown by over 20% to 1151 and we have generated huge traffic back to our website with over 2000 link clicks from the 500 interactions we have had during this period.

 

Advanced metrics allow us to measure all of this activity against other organisations active in urology. For example our Klout score has increased from 46 to 53 with a corresponding increase in our Peerindex rating. We are leading the field across all of the key domains we have targeted to date and continue to make progress as we introduce further changes at bjui.org in 2013.

Our Facebook site is now highly engaging and is constantly updated with news and content from our website.

 

We have recorded over 73,000 page impressions by 11,000 Facebook visitors in the first two months of 2013, a huge rise from previously, and all of this traffic gets directed back to content at bjui.org, whether that be a Journal article, blog, picture quiz or our new “poll of the week”.

 

Our YouTube site is updated with videos from authors and other multimedia content to complement citable articles published in the Journal. You will see a lot more content added here in coming months.

But perhaps the most talked-about area we have introduced is Blogs@BJUI. And although we are the first mainstream urology journal to introduce a blog site, other journals have done so with great success. In September, Matt Bultitude and I visited the social media team at the BMJ to get some tips on how they had developed their social media strategy into the very successful multi-platform spectacular that they now oversee. Juliet Dobson, Blogs Editor and Assistant Web Editor at the BMJ offered some excellent advice to help us get up and running and their former Editor, Richard Smith, remains one of the bloggers I most admire. BMJ Blogs is well worth a visit for aspiring bloggers to read some of the best.

We launched our new website on the 2nd January 2013 to coincide with the new Editor taking the helm, and also published our first blog that day. From then until the 28th February 2013, Blogs@BJUI has featured the following:

  • 35 blogs contributed by 25 authors on three continents
  • 133 comments from all over the world
  • 8 editorial blogs from our specialty Associate Editors
  • Multidisciplinary contributions from both authors and comment-leavers

The topics have included everything from urology humour, through the European Working Time Directive, reality TV and an eminent urologist describing his recent personal experience of robotic radical prostatectomy. Our contributors have included many of the key opinion leaders in social media in urology, many of whom are rising stars or already established in academic urology. Also established urology opinion-leaders who are rather new to social media but enjoying the challenge! Other contributors are young trainees who have proved themselves to be talented bloggers already. I am quite pleased that the most-read blogs in January and February were written by two young trainees of mine in Melbourne. But I am sure the self-appointed King of Twitter, Ben Davies, and other established stars of urology social media will be vying for such coveted titles as the months go by.

I had set a target that by the end of the first quarter we would have 1000 readers per month visiting Blogs@BJUI. By the end of the February, we had already had over 9000 visits to our blog site! Each reader spent over 3.5 minutes per blog and many of them left comments or pushed out links to our blogs using Twitter or Facebook. We have had many comments posted by readers from every corner of the world and have enjoyed some very humorous posts. For us, social media is all about engagement. We want to use these platforms to allow readers to passively engage with us by liking, sharing, tweeting content that they enjoy whether that is a full paper in the BJUI, a blog post, YouTube video, weekly poll or Picture Quiz of the Week. And for those who want to engage more actively, we strongly encourage you to join the conversation and add a comment to any of our blogs.

So we have had a great start to our social media push at the BJUI. And there will be a lot more to come in the coming months – watch for our activity during the upcoming conference season and look forward to the results of the inaugural BJUI Social Media Awards to be announced at the American Urological Association Annual Meeting. For those of you who are new to social media, I encourage you to dip your toes in by reading a blog or two and adding a comment. Before you know it you will have downloaded the Twitter app to your smartphone and you’ll be off and running! For the Twitterati, I thank you for all your enthusiasm in helping us get social media up and running at the BJUI and I look forward to your blogs, mentions, re-tweets and podcasts over the coming months. Social media is all about engagement – join the conversation @BJUIjournal.

 

Declan Murphy is a uro-oncologist in Melbourne and is Associate Editor of Social Media at the BJUI. Follow him on Twitter @declangmurphy

Podcasts Made Simple

/by

The other day we were listening to a podcast of a surgical technique; sadly, it sounded like a report from the BBC’s war correspondent in Afghanistan. The static was considerable and the recording of poor quality, as if transmitted by radiophone from a remote part of the world.

In keeping with our pledge to improve the quality of the BJUI, we present here a simple method of recording and submitting podcasts of the highest quality from your home or office. The results are obvious on bjui.org, where you can listen to a 60-second podcast on successful podcasting, in the BJUI Tube section. We encourage authors who have had their papers accepted to try this simple trick. We look forward to receiving your podcasts, which may enhance your articles in the right circumstances.

If you use an iPhone you should select the preinstalled ‘Voice Memo’ app. Similar apps are available for Android and other systems.

Simply tap ‘record’ when you are ready and start talking. Remember to breathe normally and speak in an even tone.

Once you are happy with your recording, simply use the share button to submit the file to us using our editorial office email address: [email protected]

 

 

In this issue, the Article of the Month is by Cooperberg et al. who present an analysis of the lifetime cost-utility of treatments for localised prostate cancer. This is a timely and controversial paper with an accompanying editorial from Pickard and Vale, who have been involved in a number of Health Technology Assessment. Cost-effectiveness ratios are now as important as clinical effectiveness although it does not necessarily mean that cheaper is always better. You can also enjoy a YouTube video provided by the authors to accompany their article in the BJUI Tube section of our website. To promote immediacy, we request you to add your comments to Blogs@BJUI. These will eventually replace the current section entitled Letter to the Editor. The debate needs to be topical and timely and not a year on when hardly anyone can remember what the original fuss was all about.

Prokar Dasgupta
Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Bultitude
Associate Editor, Web

 

Disclaimer: The BJUI does not support any particular smart phone. That choice is entirely up to our readers. Who knows, you may even decide not to have one, hence here is the paper version of our simple trick.

BJUI Online

/2 Comments/by

 

 

Matthew Bultitude, BJUI Associate Editor, discusses the direction the Journal has taken towards the web. The video includes an explanation of the key features that can be found on the BJUI website, including the Article of the Week, Picture Quizzes, Polls, Blogs and Videos.

The Journal that never sleeps

/5 Comments/by

Thank you all for your overwhelming support of the new web and paper versions of the BJUI. For those who have missed it, please check out the web journal at: www.bjui.org.

We hope you had a relaxing holiday period – we certainly did and recharged our batteries. Despite this, the editorial team at the BJUI handled 76 articles between Christmas 2012 and New Year’s Day 2013; an average of 10 per day.

This is a reflection of the global popularity of the BJUI. We have papers coming in from all over the world from many different time zones. Furthermore, New Year celebrations in the West do not necessarily match others, such as the Chinese New Year or the Baisakhi in the Northern Indian subcontinent. The BJUI wants to continue receiving the best papers from our authors irrespective of where they are on this planet.

As a celebration of our truly global presence we are delighted to present content from around the world at www.bjui.org as articles, blogs and videos, and we invite you to post your comments on any or all of these.

The BJUI poll shows that our readers love the ‘article of the week’, which is available completely free to everyone, everywhere.

In this issue we highlight the role of tadalafil, not just in erectile dysfunction but also in ejaculatory and orgasmic dysfunction. This article provides Level 1 evidence and is accompanied by an editorial from Mike Wyllie, our expert in Sexual Medicine.

Please keep the conversations going on Twitter, Facebook and Blogs@BJUI. Your web journal needs you.

Prokar Dasgupta, Editor-in-Chief

Ashutosh Tewari, Editorial Board

Video of Ashutosh Tewari reading the Journal in New York

BJUI at USICON

/2 Comments/by

BJUI had a very successful meeting at USICON in Pune. The hospitality was superb and a very well organised meeting. BJUI was represented by myself as Chairman of the Executive and by Prof Prokar Dasgupta as our new Editor. Prokar and his USICON counterparts put on a superb three hour symposium on how to organise a research project for publication. This symposium was extremely well attended with a vigorous interaction with the audience – it was very lively. In addition, Prokar had a significant input into a symposium on robotic prostatectomy as well as other scientific areas. Clearly, USICON were very pleased to see such an input into the USI from the BJUI and our attendance seemed to re-invigorate the relationship.

David Quinlan is Chairman of the BJU International Charity; Consultant Urologist at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin; Senior Lecturer in Surgery at University College, Dublin, Ireland.

BJUI Editor-in-Chief Prokar Dasgupta with Drs Rane, Kochikar and Patel at USICON

 

Comments on this blog are now closed.

 

“The most read surgical journal on the web”

/3 Comments/by

It is an enormous privilege becoming the new Editor-in-Chief of the BJUI. As an academic it has been my ultimate dream. Thank you for this exciting opportunity to serve our readers and authors. I also wanted to express my gratitude to our editorial board and reviewers without whom this journal would not exist.

Early one morning during the BAUS annual meeting 2012, I had the great pleasure of having breakfast with John Fitzpatrick. He has done wonders with the BJUI and I wish to thank and congratulate him for his excellent leadership, international collaboration and innovative approach, which has established the journal as a global landmark in urology. I asked him to describe his most important contribution to the BJUI in one word. The answer without hesitation was ‘colour’.

John immediately asked me the same question. With equal conviction I uttered the words that would describe the BJUI in the next 5 years –’the web’.

The other day I made my usual trip to the Guy’s Hospital, King’s College London, library. I love reading the new journals as well as archived copies that are stored on the first floor. I have done so regularly for the last 10 years. On this occasion I requested our friendly librarian to guide me towards the new editions of Science and the N Engl J Med. Rather to my astonishment, she said that the first floor had been shut and there were no paper journals there anymore! Instead she directed me to a computer terminal where I could browse every scientific journal with my college user name and password. It was then that I realised that my own library had stopped subscribing to paper journals. I have since learned that many other libraries have done the same. Libraries and not urologists are the largest subscribers of the BJUI. If they do not want paper journals they are just not going to buy them.

Welcome to the green revolution.

Over the next few years it will be my mission to make the BJUI the most read surgical journal on the web. We have not made the mistake of assuming that this is what all our readers want. Therefore, while we make the transition to the web, the paper version continues, but with a few differences. We will be reducing the number of paper issues to once a month. Our readers have told us that as soon as the first edition comes out of its plastic cover, the next one arrives. This is often rather overwhelming for a busy urologist who may find it challenging to find the important messages. A direct result of reducing the number of volumes is that fewer papers will ultimately be published and the acceptance rate will fall to ~15%. A triage system has been introduced whereby papers that are not felt to be suitable for the new journal are returned immediately to the authors. This is not a reflection of the quality of the papers but reduces wastage of valuable time and allows the articles to be submitted elsewhere without delay.

The BJUI website www.bjui.org has been entirely redesigned and, in keeping with our main mission statement, I have gathered a dedicated new team of enthusiastic innovators. You will notice that unlike other journals we have Associate Editors for innovation, impact, web, social media and design. These are young urologists with unique skills allowing us to deliver the BJUI on an exciting web-based platform that will evolve continuously. I hope you can join us on this journey.

The busy modern surgeon has a short attention span. If we cannot attract them to our key messages within 30 seconds of reaching our landing page, it is unlikely that they will stay there for 3 minutes rather than go elsewhere. Extensive studies and searches on web-based metrics have made these facts obvious to me. These are the realities of modern academic publishing. The web-based journal will have a much wider readership, not just amongst urologists but also other doctors, nurses, students and most importantly patients and their families.

With this in mind we have introduced the ‘article of the week’, almost like the headline news of The Times. If most urologists read just this on their iPads or smart phones, rather than ever even look at the paper version, we have successfully made our point. This month one such article is the updated Partin tables. As a predictive tool, they are important to urologists and patients alike and will allow our readers to counsel patients about the potential outcomes after treatment of their prostate cancer.

Another new feature is the BJUI blog for immediacy, HuffPost style; the days of writing a letter to the editor that gets published a year later are no more. Instead, your opinions will be moderated and appear real time on the website. The debate will be timely, educational and enjoyable.

Social media, especially Twitter, will play an important role in highlighting the most important content and allowing rapid interaction during international meetings. We have engaged the services of a group specialising in social media and I urge you to follow the BJUI on Facebook and Twitter. Who knows ‘tweetations’ might become as important as the impact factor, one day soon.

Finally, I wanted to especially thank Francesco Montorsi for inspiring me during dinner one autumn evening in Milan, where I had been invited to review a European Union grant application. The lesson I learnt from him was humility. As the Editor-in-Chief I always remember an important tale published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ describes what happens when a vain king is paraded by two rogue weavers in his invisible new clothes through the streets of his own capital. I hope I will always manage to avoid the ‘emperor syndrome’. My job is to serve our readers and focus above all on the one thing that is of utmost importance to the BJUI – quality.

Prokar Dasgupta

Twitter: my #eurekamoment #pennydrops #babyvomit

/4 Comments/by

I remember distinctly when the penny dropped for me. It was about 2am on a warm summer’s night in early January 2012 (apologies to those of you shivering in the Northern Hemisphere). I had my one-week old son in one arm, swinging between sleeping and spewing, and an iPad in my other hand, providing distraction between nappy changes and feeds. The sleep-deprivation had dulled my senses considerably and my brain was capable of no more than light reading.

It was then I read a piece in the New York Times online about the power of Twitter in medical communication. Previously, I thought Twitter was the domain of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian (Kim who?) and various narcissistic cricket and football players. It seemed like puerile nonsense for a generation that I no longer belonged to. However, reading this opinion piece made me think again. It was clear that there is a whole generation of significant academic clinicians, researchers and publishers who have embraced social media and who use Twitter, in particular, to disseminate their work with a speed and reach that is simply unachievable through any other medium. I was struck by various examples of how key scientific publications are first flagged on Twitter and how within hours, responses are made by key opinion leaders and these responses are again disseminated rapidly around the Twittersphere. And although none of the examples were based around urology, it was clear to me that oncologists and surgeons were getting on board the social media rollercoaster.

So between nappy changes and having wiped some baby vomit off my iPad, I logged onto Twitter and created a username. I searched for prostate cancer and urology and quickly found my way to a few key resources and super-users who seemed to have a very active Twitter presence and who were tweeting content that immediately appeared of interest to me. Within a few minutes I had identified a few highly valuable Twitter users to follow and within their lists of followers and those who they were following, I quickly built up a useful stream of tweets dropping into my timeline. And then of course, a few of these Twitterers started following me back, which was mildly exciting. Within a few days and having posted a few tweaks, I began to feel part of the Twittersphere.

As the weeks went by, I continued to be astounded by just how fast information travels on Twitter. While I get emails with the table of contents for the various journals that I subscribe to, these only drop in my inbox every few weeks. Also, because there are a number of significant journals that I do not subscribe to (non-urological mostly), there are many papers published out there that do not come immediately to my attention. Depending on which Twitter sites you follow, all key papers related to your area of interest find their way into your timeline instantaneously as soon as they are published. Not just that, very interesting comment from others also gets to you very quickly. For example, key findings in prostate cancer tend to be picked up by the major US news sites who then invite comment from key leaders in major cancer centres. A typical example is that of the PSA screening recommendations made by the United States Preventive Services Taskforce in June 2012, which provoked huge controversy. Twitter came to life and key opinion leaders such as Matt Cooperberg (@cooperberg_ucsf) helped drive the conversation through Twitter and blogs (e.g.The Huffington Post blog) at lightning speed. These comments get tweeted out and responses to these comments also get blogged and within hours of a paper being published you have news of the paper, expert comment and wider reaction…… all in 140 characters or less!

And while none of us have much time in the day to add an extra task, I find that waiting for my coffee in the morning or while the resident puts an arterial line in my next patient, there are a few spare moments in the day where the Twitter app on my iPhone comes to life. Twitter is perfectly suited to the smart phone user and that is where the majority of tweets around the world are generated from. It is also perfectly suited for one of the other very exciting areas in which I have seen Twitter play a very useful role – that of conferencing. At the EAU in Paris, a small but energetic group of Twitter users started tweeting content from various sessions at this large meeting and started engaging with other Twitter users around the world. For me, I believe conferencing is about to be transformed by the power of social media but more about that soon.

For now, at the new BJUI, we want to grow the audience and get you all to join the conversation. Through Twitter, blogging, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms, we are building for the future of communication in urology. The next generation of trainees will be deeply embedded in all of these platforms and will expect to be engaged through them. We are entering a new generation of medical communication – come join the conversation.

Declan Murphy
@declangmurphy

 

Declan Murphy is Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Surgery, University of Melbourne, St Vincent’s Hospital and Director of Robotic Surgery at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He had previously been consultant urological surgeon at Guys & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London.

 

Comments on this blog are now closed.

Face-to-Face with John Fitzpatrick

/by

An interview with John M. Fitzpatrick
BJUI December 2012, Volume 110, Issue 11

‘Face to Face’ is an interview with personalities in the urology field. As a successor to BJUI’s ‘Conversations’ feature, ‘Face to Face’ is fashioned after the highly acclaimed BBC television series of the same name where former British politician John Freeman interviewed famous men and women with an insightful and probing style.

In this edition of ‘Face to Face’, BJUI Associate Editor Roger Kirby (and a former ‘Face to Face’ interviewee), turns the tables and interviews John M. Fitzpatrick, MCh, FRCSI, FEBU, FRCS, in honour of 10 years of service as outgoing Editor-in-Chief of BJUI. After serving for 25 years as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Dublin and University College Dublin, where he also received his medical school training, John is now head of research at the Irish Cancer Society. His list of medals, awards, prizes, and honorary degrees are simply too numerous to mention. This year, he was named Honorary Fellow of the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand and received the Distinguished Career Award from the Société Internationale d’Urologie. His visiting professorships, invited lectures, and charitable work has taken him to the four corners of the world.

Please use the controls below to listen to the podcast:

Read the full article
© 2024 BJU International. All Rights Reserved.