Important message from Dr. Julie Silver for all #WomenInMedicine allies:
You’ve been great supporters of women in medicine and behind the scenes I’m sharing with you a strategy that @PROWDWomen is using so that you can use it to support your own work. This strategy involves how to use alternative metrics to analyze and disseminate peer reviewed published reports. This is a big thank you for supporting #PROWD! If you want to drop off of this, just mute or let me know. Feel free to bring in any others who are allies.
To start, this morning I took a look at a study pub by Dr. Oxentenko et al and it was an important study that showed women residents are somehow penalized by their peers for having a baby during residency (but men with new babies are not). This is a study that we should all be thinking about and talking about–and hopefully finding solutions to. I looked at the “attention score” via alternative metrics and it was low. This score underestimates how many people, incl doctors are talking about it bc it only tracks the attention when the link is included and only for certain platforms such as social media and conventional media (it wouldn’t track someone talking about it during a lecture, for example). Here’s where we started this morning.
There are a lot of ways to get the attention score, my favorite is via the altmetric bookmarklet that you can download for free. The reason I like that is I can go on PubMed and see the attention score and the details for any report (doi number is linked to it so this is only for those with doi numbers). If you want to download it, google “Altmetric bookmarklet”
After I saw the low attention score for this important study, I created this tweet that includes the link to Dr. O’s study:
I let some people know about the tweet, via DM, and it is now off and running. Within minutes, I could see the change in the attention score as it went from 35 to 52. That’s not a huge jump, but this is real time info about how this study is being disseminated. Look at this image and you can see my bookmarklet button on the top left corner. You can also see the attention score that appears on the top right after I click on the bookmarklet button. Look at the writing under the score. Do you see the link that says “click for more details”? That is what I’ll show you next.
In this shot you can see how this study is ranking within this journal’s own attention scores. We’d like this study to get to the #1 slot. You can help by tweeting/retweeting the study link and sharing it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.
In this [first] image [below] we can see that only 18 doctors have tweeted about it (and been captured as a physician). Remember this does underestimate things a bit, but it still tells us that we need to get the word out to a lot more doctors about this important study. Again, in real time we will be able to track this.
In this [second] shot [below] we can see which doctors have actually tweeted about it. Thanks to those of you who have done so already!! Remember, that together we can do this to support each other’s published work and that of our colleagues–on all topics in medicine.
When you click for more details, you can see that this report is #1 compared to every report pub in the journal (932).
When you develop a strategic initiative, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t work if it’s all about you/your work. Other people have to care about it and even more than that, they have to “own it”. It has to become their work, too. Using physician workforce gender equity as the example, it’s important to remember that this is not a “women’s problem”. To show you how I strategically engaged and mentored/sponsored 3 very talented medical students (included in this group DM), take a look at the screen shot that shows the blogs written by Drs. Jim Eubanks, Kirstin Weider and Sarah Smith. In each of these blogs they shared links to the studies I have published on this topic AND, they shared links to each other’s blogs. A nice synergy on many levels. Keep in mind that our trainees and early career doctors can be highly influential on social media, and enlisting them to not only help us but also make this part of their work going forward is key to success. I’ll circle back around on this later and fill you in with more details. Feel free to send me a DM here or individually if you have questions. Go team!!
The message above is from Dr. Julie Silver. You can find her on twitter @JulieSilverMD.