The journal club picks a paper to discuss, often using crowdsourcing to select something people are interested in. Everyone logs into Twitter at a specific time and has an online conversation with people from around the globe. Someone may facilitate and use pre-selected questions, but there's also time for open discussion. You can string many tweets together, so you can basically write as much as you want.

Most journal clubs meet once a month for an hour, but the nice thing about Twitter is that the conversation is saved. So, if someone wants to comment the next day, the participants will see those responses whenever they log into Twitter. That's important because participants are from different time zones. Having the conversation publicly recorded could be an issue for some people, but I think scientists and clinicians aren't shy about asking questions and critiquing papers, even publicly.

How Twitter based Journal Clubs work

1. "The drawback of any Twitter-based discussion is the seemingly evanescent nature of tweets. Unless deleted, tweets remain available for anyone seeking to find them.
However, reading individual tweets or scrolling through a discussion at a later time does not capture the conversational thread, or the gist of the opinions voiced during the live journal club."
2. "The time when the live discussion occurs, specifically for synchronous discussions, is often in the late evening or night, which can encroach on family time and is not convenient for everyone"
3. "Others find the discussion
fragmented and not necessarily coherent, especially when not viewed in real time and if one is unable to follow the conversational thread."
4. "Everything that is tweeted is not necessarily accurate, and some participants may tweet factually wrong or unsupported opinions."
5. "The number of tweets in a single session may be overwhelming for the new user. As an extreme example, during the live discussion of the Canagliflozin and Renal Events in Diabetes with Established Nephropathy Clinical Evaluation trial, there were 637 participants who tweeted 2,840 times."

Problems of  Twitter-based Journal Clubs

1. How it works
2. Problems of  Twitter-based Journal Clubs

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

1. Science Rapid PREreview (outbreaksci.prereview.org) (schwab2020science)
2. Pubpeer journal club pubpeer.com (Langham 2019)
3. 27 active Twitter-Based Journal Clubs (Stoneman2020)
4. retractionwatch.com. 30 papers about COVID-19 was retracted being 1410 cited totally.cost: US$425 000 per article (dinis 2020)

Alternative technologies to help fight against the pandemic

Johansson, M. A., & Saderi, D. (2020). Open peer-review platform for COVID-19 preprints. Natur, 579(7797), 29-29.

Open peer-review platform for COVID-19 preprints

Langham-Putrow, A., & Riegelman, A. (2019). Discovery and scholarly communication aspects of preprints: Sources for online information. College & Research Libraries News, 80(9), 506

Discovery and scholarly communication aspects of preprints.

Dinis-Oliveira, R. J. (2020). COVID-19 research: pandemic versus “paperdemic”, integrity, values and risks of the “speed science”. Forensic Sciences Research, 1-14.


COVID-19 research: pandemic versus “paperdemic”,
integrity, values and risks of the “speed science”


Twitter-based Journal Clubs

Citation number of a paper is not reliable

Modeling the viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 infection published on  6August 2020. The original paper was retracted on July 10, 2020

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