I magine the perfect medical education conference. It would be in an easily accessible place filled with engaged learners. Participants could stay as long as they liked, and participate as they wished. The ideas exchanged would always be available for future reference, and could evolve over time. Coffee would be plentiful and bagels would be fresh. Sounds pretty good, right? Contrast that utopian view with the reality of contemporary journal club conferences. By all accounts, trainee participation in journal clubs improves biostatistics knowledge and critical appraisal skills, and promotes evidence-based practice. Yet journal clubs are limited by their real time only nature, relatively low attendance, and propensity to overrepresent the viewpoints of a handful of vocal participants, who tend to overpower even the most diplomatic of mediators. New technology applied to the journal club concept has the potential to overcome these limitations to a large degree. Twitter-based and blog-based journal clubs attempt to address the problem of real-time participation by separating conference attendance from conference participation. Through these types of social media, participants can contribute their perspectives at their leisure using technology fundamentally designed with community and collaboration in mind. Although they have been at least modestly successful, social media–powered journal clubs introduce problems of their own. For example, while Twitter simplifies the act of contributing to a discussion, this medium offers little in the way of content organization. Learning anything from a journal club discussion that occurred months ago using Twitter is difficult. Similar limitations hold for blogs, which tend to relegate reader contributions to an unorganized comment section. Both platforms require special interventions to correct errors. In Twitter, it is easy to propagate errors from 1 tweet to the next. And in blog posts, errors tend to have long life spans since their content is editable only by the original author. We set out to create an online journal club that combined Twitter’s ease of contributing with the intuitive organization of an encyclopedia that would foster a collaborative community of medical learners of all levels. Subsequently, in 2011, we founded Wiki Journal Club (WJC, www.wikijournalclub.org). Powering WJC is the same wiki technology used by the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit content directly in a browser. At the center of WJC is a bibliography of landmark studies organized by disease, specialty, and publication date. The selection of studies is determined by consensus among WJC editors, with an emphasis on highly relevant, practice-changing studies in internal medicine, as well as studies requested by readers. The majority of studies are controlled intervention trials, although WJC reviews other types of research. Each study has an associated entry on WJC that can be written and edited by anyone with an account. Entry titles use the most common name of the journal article: think ‘‘Rivers Trial’’ rather than ‘‘Early GoalDirected Therapy in the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock.’’ Each WJC entry is a living, breathing journal club conference that follows a simple structure. The page header provides the full citation and URLs for PubMed listings, full text on the publisher’s website, and a PDF on the publisher’s website. The main content of each entry is divided into sections, including Bottom Line, Major Points, Guidelines, Criticisms, and Further Reading (table provided as online supplemental material). In general, 1 or 2 contributors provide the bulk of an entry’s initial content, with editorial assistance from the WJC staff, who fact check for accuracy and completeness. When DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-14-00488.1
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Nov 29, 2023
Ardi Mandani + 1
Open Access
