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…

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…

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…

We’ve redesigned the BMJ website. It went live late on Tuesday evening (UK time), with a prominent feedback button on the homepage asking for comments. We’ve produced a video guide to the new site, and an editorial explaining some of the changes, as well as some FAQs that we will update on an ongoing basis. This blog highlights some of the issues you have raised so far and what we are doing to address them. more…

What is the BMJ? When I ask people at outreach lectures and seminars, I get various answers ranging from the traditionalists who see still the BMJ as just another paper journal in their Friday morning letterbox, to others for whom it is multimedia medical communications opportunity. For one clinician lecturer, we are a podcast that he listens to while cycling to work on his academic  day. more…

The social networking site Mumsnet is running a lively debate about how breast feeding rates could be increased. It was triggered by two recent BMJ research articles. You can follow the debate at this link.

Meanwhile, 23 signatories have writen a letter to The Times critising the UK Government’s failure to provide women with enough information in the NHS leaflets. This follows a BMJ analysis article which says that breast screening leaflets do not adequately highlight the risks that screening can pose. The harm of screening is overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment of healthy women. more…

The BMJ received some praise this week in a blog by Revere, on the Science Blogs forum. Here is an extract:

“Science journals are not just about science. They compete with each other for readership, public recognition and prestige. It used to be that in the UK publishing world The British Medical Journal (BMJ) was the dull, conservative journal and The Lancet was more “out there.”….Now they seemed to have switched places.” more…

Two BMJ studies published last week have been widely cited by the press. The first has found that women’s resting heart rate is a good predictor of coronary events in women. US researchers studied the heart rates of 129,000 postmenopausal women and found that those with the highest heart rates were more likely to have a myocardial infarction or coronary death than those with the lowest heart rates. more…

The news that cello scrotum is a myth has captured the attention of the press this week and it has been widely cited both in the UK and internationally. The revelation comes as last week Elaine and John Murphy wrote a letter to the BMJ confessing that they invented the condition. They were inspired to make up cello scrotum after reading a letter in the BMJ in 1974 about guitar nipple but decided to own up to the hoax after it was cited in a Christmas BMJ article. more…