The journal club has a long tradition, and a hallowed space in the training of physicians (Did you know that William Osler organized the first journal club at McGill University in 1875?). It is the teaching session where trainees and teachers exchange roles. Journal club is the area where the flipped classroom has been fully implemented in medical education. Read and study the article at home, and then use classroom time to critically debate the methods, results and interpretation of the article.

This makes journal club a natural fit for social media. Social media is built around decreasing barriers to communication. It is designed to connect people of like interests. NephJC uses the nephrology Twitter community to generate a healthy discussion and critical review of the literature that drives nephrology forward.

Paul Sufka wrote a nice post on Twitter Journal Clubs for Symplur.

Why

After decades of ossification, nephrology is back on the move. While once the butt of jokes due to the lack of randomized trials in our field, we are in the midst of a literature bloom with trials covering all aspects of neophrology. OIt is exciting but keeping up is a full time job. NephJC tries to lower the burden by choosing important manuscripts and then offering numerous learning pathways for people to access. We are more than just a twice a month chat.

When

We do the NephJC twitter chat twice a month, on a Tuesday at 9 PM Eastern Standard Time for the American participants, then again the day at 9 PM IST for India and East Asia

A day or two before the American chat we will post a summary and a visual abstract. Think of the summary as a 15-20 minute brief on the manuscript. You will get some detail, the methods, the results and a brief discussion of the implications. The visual abstract is a 1 minute summary of the article. Give us a minute and you will get the big picture of the study. After that we have the live chat, an hour long discussion of the article on Twitter. A week later we push out a 10 tweet NephJC, a tweetorial that allows you to get the gist in 5 minutes. And the last part of the educational is a podcast. These are deep dives with experts to really get to the bottom of the trial. These come anywhere from weeks to months after the chat.

How

How to particiapte in the live tweet chat:

Step Zero: Read the Article. Sign up for the newsletter and every Monday or Tuesday we will send an e-mail with a link the article,

Step One: Go to Tweetdeck.com and log in with your Twitter credentials

Step Two: Add a search column and enter #NephJC.

Step Three: The Search Column has the #NephJC chat. Follow that stream and you are following the chat. It automatically adds the newest tweets to the top, don’t feel bad if you fall behind by 5 minutes or so. It’s alright.

Step Four: Make sure you add #NephJC to everyone of your tweets.

More detailed instructions can be found here.

We follow a pretty standard script. Here is that script for people who like spoilers.

If you need a tutorial on getting started on Twitter we put this together.

In 2017, Matt, Joel, and Swapnil did a social media workshop at KIDNEYcon. Here are the resources from that.