Social media all-star and DreamRCT trialist, Paul Sufka gave grand rounds at Hennepin County Medical Center on Twitter for Journal Clubs and Medical Education. Beautiful slides.
#NephJC does #pericytes - part 1
Not #parasites or ... #pedicure?
This was a fantastic chat last night, with great questions from Mal Parmar, Scott Brimble, Dylan Burger and others; clear and articulate answers from Ben Humphreys - and a link heavy tweeting from Matt Sparks. The transcript will read almost like a review article - or commentary.
Stay Tuned for the EU/African chat, occurring in just over 2 hours at 8 pm *BST* - with first author Rafael Kramann joinin in this time.
In the Literature...
We mentioned the #MICE project in the newsletter a few days ago (what newsletter?? Check out and sign up - low volume, once a week, will keep you updated) - authored by Tejas Desai, Edgar Lerma, Ryan Madanick et al. It's published on the Winnower platform and has already accumulated some interesting reviews, including Chi Chu & Francesco. Two in particular stand out for their insightful comments - out-rivalling any peer review you may have seen, by Len Starnes and David Goldfarb, the latter written in his incomparable signature style.
Another fun paper (CoI alert: includes Swapnil and Joel as co-authors) is a 'Ten Steps for Setting up an Online Journal Club' - available here ($walled). This was a fun experience - crowd-sourced, written from start to end in a matter of days, and shepherded quite ably by Teresa Chan to publication.
Journal article on starting an online journal club
NephJC co-creators Topf and Hiremath contributed to a recent publication on nephrology journal clubs. It s a pretty quick read that should help people replicate the success of NephJC. Take a look.
The thing that gets us to the thing...
Matt and I wrote a wrap-up post for NephMadness that went up on MedScape today. Please go read it. In it we explain what we are trying to do with the various social media events and projects we promote for nephrology:
“We have established an informal curriculum of digital mentorship. The goal is to provide a vibrant community of always-available, academically minded nephrologists who are interested in sharing their skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Most of these conversations are spontaneous. Examples include recent discussions on the relationship between sodium linked glucose transporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors (a new drug for the treatment of diabetes) and diabetic ketoacidosis and another about whether one should stop antiplatelet agents before kidney biopsy. The tweets were a mixture of references, pithy bits of insight, images from primary sources, and opinions.”
NephJC and NephMadness are stepping stones to this always available online community. They are important for setting the tone and attracting people who share our vision and academic values. But in the end, NephJC isn't the thing it is just the means of getting to the ultimate goal of a viable, self-perpetuating, professional network, of academically-minded, nephrologists particiapating in social media. I was reminded of this while watching the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire. The plot turns on an old article written by the protagonist, Gordon Clark, where he states that computers aren't the thing, but rather the thing that gets us to the thing.
#NephJC 28 - Stats
North American Chat
GMT chat
Quite close - and the stats from Symplur don't capture all the differences. Very different feel, and discussion. Storify to follow.
Swapnil Hiremath, MD
#NephJC has RSS subscribers?
A few months ago, we mentioned how to subscribe our feed with RSS.
At that time, we had one subscriber (Swapnil) - and to our great surprise, it seems to be that RSS is back. Just see below:
Unless there are spam RSS subscriptions somehow....
In some other news, we would like to thank Marjorie Lazoff for mentioning us in the LITFL blog - go check out their literature review here.
Swapnil Hiremath, M.D.
What are the characteristics of a great journal club?
We are working on a survey of NephJC and I am trying to wrap my mind around what are the most important questions to ask. I really want to know how well NephJC compares as an educational experience to "In Real Life" journal clubs Thinking about that lead to this discussion on Twitter:
A red letter day for the GMT chatters
With a healthy bump in participants post #ERAEDTA15, just compare the participants. 'Nuff said.
The American chat
The GMT chat
Humble beginnings
I had thought of starting a Nephrology Journal club ever since I wrote about eJC on PBFluids. In fact if you look at my suggestions for how to improve CJASN eJC, you will see the skeleton for the current #NephJC. But ideas are cheap and I never did anything about it.
In the middle of NephMadness last year I received a tweet from from Swapnil suggesting that someone do a Nephrology Twitter Journal Club. I told him it was a great idea but that I had my hands full with NephMadness and that he should write me after the contest ended.
Literally moments after we announced the winner of NephMadness, Swapnil e-mails me about the journal club. I told him to do some research on how twitter journal clubs work and write a post on Medium. I half hoped he would drop the ball and go away but he published it on April 17. A week later we collaborated on a tighter introduction, also published on Medium (we didn't yet have our SquareSpace sight) And five days after that we held our first NephJC.