Journal clubs in the digital age: Twitter for continuing professional development

Abstract

The departmental journal club (JC) is a well-established form of continuing professional development (CPD). Social media offers a range of interactive online platforms, allowing the traditional JC to move from a formal educational meeting with local health professionals to a digital platform with users across the world. The authors created the General Internal Medicine JC (@GIMJClub) on Twitter and following a year of activity retrospectively analysed the participation and impact of this medium of JC delivery. There were 61 different participants across different continents, specialties and levels who participated in the 12 JC sessions and sent 1,543 tweets in total. Factors that appeared to infl uence the success of an individual JC session included choosing diverse, topical papers to discuss and a wide range of hosts. This work demonstrates the success of a Twitter-based general internal medicine JC for CPD. @GIMJClub facilitated unique and diverse interactions not otherwise available.