Interactive Journals and the Future of Medical Publications

The Internet has revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge. Young physicians and students are more comfortable viewing online publications and often prefer online educational material to print. To serve this growing change,most journals have created Web sites enabling their readers to view publications online. This change is accompanied by an immense amount of medical literature being published,leaving medical practitioners burdened with the need to target literature most relevant to their practice and evaluate the impact of these publications in real time. As the need for an ongoing evaluation process grows,some journals have begun creating Web logs or “blogs” and allowing public commentary on Web sites,which allows readers to express opinions on publications and share them with colleagues. We believe this interaction between readers and authors by virtue of the Internet will change medical publications to a Web-based forum exposing scholarly thinking to the collective judgment of a much broader interest of clinicians,academicians,and patients than can be accomplished via paper. This article reviews the use of blogs,social media,and commentary sections in popular biomedical journals and discusses how these interactive tools can benefit the medical community.
The American Journal of Medicine

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