The BMJ tends not to commission obituaries of non-doctors. I can understand why. The journal’s print obituary section is already awash with the lives of distinguished doctors from the UK and overseas. It would need to be a lot larger if coverage was extended to eminent nurses, former health ministers, academics, and campaigners, But if its policy was different, I would have liked to see a BMJ obituary of Lord Ashley of Stoke, who died last month aged 89. more…

Should the journal article change, and if so, how? In this multimedia age, the workforce is increasingly populated by people who grew up with the internet, scholarly publishers anticipate the demise of the traditional article and spend lots of time rethinking how best to present the information it contains. more…

I’m not surprised that Guy Kawasaki’s 10^th book is called Enchantment: How to Woo, Influence, and Persuade. It takes some chutzpah to assume near–zero knowledge of social media at a scholarly publishing conference but Kawasaki, a former “software evangelist” (I kid you not!) for Apple, pulls it off with an idiot’s guide to curation, tweeting, and why Google+ will ultimately succeed. more…

There are 1.1m cases of sepsis each year in the US, costing $17bn to treat and accounting for 17% of hospital mortality.

Doctors at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California wanted to help their fellow physicians to recognise and treat it, but instead of producing a paper or video, devised a game. more…

An apple farmer in Conservative MP Laura Sandy’s Kent constituency gets just £80 a tonne for bruised and mis-shapen fruit rejected by the supermarkets. When she visits local schools and asks how many children are planning a career in food science and production, teaching staff say they don’t want them picking beans out in the fields. more…

The redesigned bmj.com is now more than a month old and this last blog before Christmas is to update readers about the latest feedback and what we are doing about it.

First, citations. A colleague spotted that some older articles were missing page numbers in the citation line. This is now fixed.

Second, section pdfs. Before the new site went live on November 8 most recent articles had two pdf views – one of the article, and second one showing it in its print issue section (this obviously only applies if the article appeared in print, but most still do). more…

Dinah Birch’s recent review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens celebrates the “exuberant variety” and “multiplicity” of his life. He reinvented himself constantly – child labourer, solicitors’ clerk, journalist, editor, actor, philanthropist, social reformer, and a novelist who like Chaucer and Shakespeare, came to represent his age. Birch could easily have defined Dickens in terms of the professions he rejected – he was urged to enter Parliament, and, if you consider the attention Tomalin pays in her book to Dickens’ interest in health and medicine, a medical career may have beckoned. Certainly there is an established critical interest in Dickens and medicine (a colleague attended a conference on the subject earlier this year). Dickens’s fondness for the doctor might also be demonstrated by the fact that his pen spares the profession the biting social commentary reserved for lawyers and civil servants in his fiction. There is no medical equivalent of the Circumlocution Office, and no medical negligence claim equivalent to Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. more…

The eurozone is in crisis, Britain’s embassy has been stormed in Iran, youth unemployment is above a million, and the US Republicans are struggling to field a presidential candidate whose grasp of foreign policy extends beyond being able to see Russia from their back garden. So guess what the top question was on BBC Question Time last night? What should happen to Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson after he called for striking public sector workers to be shot in front of their families? more…

We are now three weeks into our new design and this is my third blog to update you on what feedback we have had and how we are responding to it.

Within minutes of the new bmj.com launching on 8 November someone tweeted that it didn’t look great on mobile phones. How right they were. Apologies for that. It’s now looking a lot better. I hope you agree. Mobile traffic is very important to us. Last month we had almost 77,000 visits from mobiles, up from 40,812 a year earlier. As I said last week, in 2012 we’ll investigate a fully optimised version of the site for mobiles. more…

Our new site is now ten days old and we’re continuing to get feedback from readers. My first blog listed some of the comments we’d had to date, and our response to them. I’ll keep blogging to update readers on the latest feedback.

We did our first post-launch release on Tuesday to mop up some of the launch bugs. We noticed soon after launch that all articles on the print table of contents were showing “web extra” immediately underneath. This has now disappeared. There were some missing articles from the the 1970s until 1993. Most of these are now showing again. more…