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Twitter, what is it good for?

Yesterday evening, a good fifty or so scientists, clinicians, students, journal editors and other interested parties took part in a twitter journal club–as far as I know, the first of its kind. The Twitter Journal Club, or #TwitJC, is the brainchild of Fi Douglas and Natalie Silvey; a Cambridge med student currently intercalating at King’s College London and a junior doctor in the West Midlands. It started when Fi tweeted,

Who would be keen to do a weekly/fortnightly Twitter journal club on clinical medicine stuff? Any thoughts for a first paper to look at?

Interest grew until last night, around 8 PM UK time, introductions were made and after a bit of noise as people took in their surroundings, people started discussing Early Goal-Directed Therapy in the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock—10.1056/NEJMoa010307 (free full text). The paper’s been cited over 1300 times, and here’s the headline finding from Natalie:

the in-hospital mortality in the control group was 46.5% vs 30.5% in the EGDT group (p = 0.009). At 28 days and 60 days there was also a statistically significant difference in mortality (p=0.01 and p=0.03) respectively. The conclusion of the paper – that early goal-directed therapy provides significant benefits in outcome for patients with severe sepsis or septic shock.

And there was quite the discussion. It went on for almost two hours, and covered topics such as what exactly is goal-directed therapy, the problems tying informed consent (of unconcious patients, no less) in with proper blind randomization, the value of the quoted stats and the quality of the study’s design and data. If you want, you can download the entire transcript. (And I think someone could make a killing if they could work out a way of threading such hashtag archives in a sensible manner.)

First indications are that the experiment was a success. I think this could be particularly valuable for junior docs and students, but it was encouraging to see more experienced people also taking part. No doubt there will be problems with the format, with noise, and with getting coherent thoughts into fewer than 132 characters (plus #TwitJC), but I think the will is there to work through these.

So, massive kudos to Fi and Natalie for setting this up. If you’re interested in the clinical sciences, do keep an eye on the #TwitJC hashtag, follow Fi and Natalie on twitter–not to mention the TwitJournalClub account itself–, and feel free to report back on your experiences.