Creating a Virtual Journal Club: A Community of Practice Using Multiple Social Media Strategies

A journal club provides an opportunity to critically appraise the medical literature and apply it to clinical practice. Traditional, in-person journal clubs face challenges of scheduling participants and facilitators, recruiting local experts, and having a limited, local impact.Journal clubs may help develop communities of practice involving “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”1 With the advent of modern digital technologies, online medical-related journal clubs are increasing: participation can be synchronous or asynchronous, experts can be recruited from a global pool, and discussions are digitally archived for broader dissemination. In addition, these journal clubs may disseminate educational innovations and interventions to a wider audience for further study, and they provide rapid feedback to authors regarding similar work occurring elsewhere. These online discourses, however, typically incorporate a single social media strategy, such as Twitter-based journal clubs (#UroJC,2 #NephJC, http://www.nephjc.com).In an age where we view, engage, and learn from multiple digital streams, a virtual journal club requires a multimodal social media strategy to optimize reach and engagement. In January 2015, a virtual medical education journal club called “JGME-ALiEM Hot Topics in Medical Education” was piloted as a joint collaboration between the Journal of Graduate Medical Education and Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM, an education blog with 1.2 million page views per year).3 This Rip Out describes how to move from hosting an online, single platform to a virtual, multimodal journal club by using a blog platform as the central repository of information to house blog comments, embedded Twitter comments, and embedded Google Hangouts on Air video discussions.