mama Last week, I wrote how several scientific journals and publishers are opening their eyes to Twitter. The confirmation of the relevance on Twitter also in relation to peer-reviewed journals comes in many different forms. This weekend, I came across a tweet giving another example :
If you click on the link in the tweet (or here), you’ll come onto the webpage of PLoS Medicine and an article by McKee M, Stuckler D, Basu S (2012) entitled: Where There Is No Health Research: What Can Be Done to Fill the Global Gaps in Health Research?
In the righthand side column (under: “share this article” – which is BTW primarily through social media) you’ll see a box from Twitter, called “What the community is saying”. In this box a roll of all the tweets linking to the article are shown in chronological order with the newest first. The reasons for why people chose to include links to a particular article in their tweets may of course be many. It could be a simple wish to spread word of the article, but could also be comments and reactions to the article and additional links to for example blog posts discussing the article.
For the authors of the article this easy access to the Twitter activity concerning their article provides and opportunity to see what the segment, who are on Twitter, are saying about the article – and not least who they are. And for the readers it is a chance to check out who else have found this article relevant. Who knows, they might be people in your area of research you were not yet acquainted with.
The Twitter box is of course not unique to the article by Martin McKee & co. but applies to all PLoS Medicine articles.
