11 May, 12 | by BMJ Group
It’s been a long time in the planning, but we have finally released a whole new group of features in the BMJ learning site.
The ratings, reviews and recommendations project has several factors.
Anyone who has ever been in a meeting discussing improving a website will have heard someone say, “can’t we make it like Amazon?”. We’ve added star ratings, which are displayed at the top on each module intro page.
4 May, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
Video games have come under attack by the mainstream media in the past few weeks, with extensive coverage of Anders Breivik’s apparent use of first-person shooter games as training aids before the Utoya massacre. Conversely, health researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the positive attributes of certain computer games.
This week’s most popular BMJ article looks at SPARX; a new cognitive behavioural therapy based computer game for young people with depression.
Researchers from the University of Auckland found that adolescents suffering from depression can benefit just as much from specialised computer therapy as they do from one-to-one therapy with a clinician.
SPARX is an interactive 3D fantasy game, similar to World of Warcraft, where a single user undertakes a series of challenges to restore balance in a virtual world dominated by GNATs (Gloomy Negative Automatic Thoughts).
27 Apr, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
Three new image quizzes have been launched by BMJ Group, covering real-life cases in Paediatrics, Sports Medicine and Emergency Medicine. The image quizzes provide an opportunity for you to use the clinical images from the following journals to test your diagnostic skills.
New images and questions appear regularly, along with several possible answers. Before selecting an answer, you can take a closer look by using the zooming function. Once you have identified the correct answer, additional information is displayed to provide further context on the diagnosis, along with any relevant references.
20 Apr, 12 | by BMJ Group
The UK schools regulator Ofsted used to employ a team of people who sent questionnaires to parents if their children’s school was undergoing an inspection.
But last year the process was automated with the launch of Parent View, a website that allows parents to fill in the 12 questions online, and update it if their opinion of a school changes over time.
The site updates daily and a school’s results are publicly visible, so parents considering one for their children can find out what other parents think about the quality of teaching, discipline, leadership, track record on tackling bullying etc.
Parent View took less than three months to develop, including user testing. The team who built it on the Drupal open source platform were asked to deliver a secure and scalable website that could handle sudden peaks in traffic and levels of interaction. more…
13 Apr, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
Following the successful launch of a mobile friendly version of Emergency Medicine Journal back in 2011, we have now rolled out the same interface on more BMJ Journals:
More mobile sites launched:
The mobile web browser detects when a user is accessing each of these sites via a mobile device. Regardless of the type of smartphone, all mobile users are automatically forwarded to an optimised template. The new system offers streamlined content and display for web-enabled, smaller screens with low bandwidth networks. It has been specifically designed to accommodate the mobile behaviour of “keeping up” and “looking up” and works across all devices, including Blackberry, Android and iPhone. more…
30 Mar, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
A host of journal editors and industry experts descended upon BMA House yesterday to discuss the latest techniques and developments in reader engagement. Highlights included a lively debate on post-publication peer review, an inspiring presentation by Twitter Journal Club founder Natalie Silvey (@silv24), encouraging advice on developing a comprehensive journal web presence by Karim Khan, and predictions for the future of social networking by Tad Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of NEJM.
Given the central theme of social media throughout the day, perhaps the most fitting way to capture the event is by following the surrounding conversation on Twitter. According to TweetReach, the stream below reached in excess of 27,000 users – quite an achievement!
more…
23 Mar, 12 | by BMJ Group
Two friends of mine are about to buy a domiciliary care business, and over dinner the other week we discussed their website and how effective search engine optimisation can ensure it shows high in any Google search.
Before long we were lamenting Google’s business practices and commercial dominance, something I blogged about in late 2011. I had lots to say about this. Earlier that week I’d returned to work after a week’s holiday and learned that Google had de-indexed bmj.com, apparently without notice.
16 Mar, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
Online publishing startup Inkling (who featured at this week’s HighWire Press Conference in Palo Alto, CA) has created a new tool that it says will appeal to professional, large-scale publishers. The software, known as Habitat, will use XML and HTML5 that can be read on a variety of platforms, including an upcoming Inkling web reader. In theory, it sounds pretty similar to Apple’s iBooks Author, but Habitat is specifically designed for large teams of collaborators with sharing and collaboration tools.
If anyone has insight into Apple’s educational efforts, it would be Inkling Co-founder and CEO, Matthew MacInnis, who was responsible for Apple’s expansion into educational markets in Asia and later a senior manager of all Apple’s international education efforts. MacInnis told us that the Inkling team set out to build a publishing platform that would redefine digital media, starting with reinventing the textbook. But in doing so, they’ve discovered that to reinvent books, they’ve had to go back to ground zero and re-imagine the entire printing process itself. more…
9 Mar, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
The image-sharing site Pinterest has enjoyed dramatic growth since its launch in February 2010. The service’s user base has grown rapidly, from 1.6 million visitors in September 2011 to 11.1 million visitors in February 2012. According to comScore, it has become the the “fastest standalone website to surpass the 10 million mark”. Not only does Pinterest drive more traffic to retail sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, it also drives more traffic to blogs than Twitter. Analytics also show that when it comes to engagement, Pinterest is second only to Facebook — its users spend, on average, 89 minutes per month on the social network.
However, there’s still a healthily high percentage of people who have heard nothing about Pinterest. So, what’s all the fuss about? And is it really dominated by images of cute kittens and elaborately conceived cupcakes?
24 Feb, 12 | by Claire Bower, Web Administrator, @clairebower
“As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest,” the altmetrics manifesto argues. “Unfortunately, scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing.” Peer review “has served scholarship well” but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher’s performance, which it wasn’t designed to do.
There are various tools that provide an easy interface for finding out readership metrics for a researcher. Until recently, none of these allowed users to choose what is included or enabled non-traditional artefacts to be combined with traditional ones. This is where Total-Impact, a new offering from the altmetric community, comes in. more…
Keep abreast of the technological developments being implemented on the BMJ journal websites.
