Matthew Bultitude, BJUI Associate Editor, discusses the direction the Journal has taken towards the web. The video includes an explanation of the key features that can be found on the BJUI website, including the Article of the Week, Picture Quizzes, Polls, Blogs and Videos.
Thank you all for your overwhelming support of the new web and paper versions of the BJUI. For those who have missed it, please check out the web journal at: www.bjui.org.
We hope you had a relaxing holiday period – we certainly did and recharged our batteries. Despite this, the editorial team at the BJUI handled 76 articles between Christmas 2012 and New Year’s Day 2013; an average of 10 per day.
This is a reflection of the global popularity of the BJUI. We have papers coming in from all over the world from many different time zones. Furthermore, New Year celebrations in the West do not necessarily match others, such as the Chinese New Year or the Baisakhi in the Northern Indian subcontinent. The BJUI wants to continue receiving the best papers from our authors irrespective of where they are on this planet.
As a celebration of our truly global presence we are delighted to present content from around the world at www.bjui.org as articles, blogs and videos, and we invite you to post your comments on any or all of these.
The BJUI poll shows that our readers love the ‘article of the week’, which is available completely free to everyone, everywhere.
In this issue we highlight the role of tadalafil, not just in erectile dysfunction but also in ejaculatory and orgasmic dysfunction. This article provides Level 1 evidence and is accompanied by an editorial from Mike Wyllie, our expert in Sexual Medicine.
Please keep the conversations going on Twitter, Facebook and Blogs@BJUI. Your web journal needs you.
Prokar Dasgupta, Editor-in-Chief
Ashutosh Tewari, Editorial Board
Video of Ashutosh Tewari reading the Journal in New York
BJUI had a very successful meeting at USICON in Pune. The hospitality was superb and a very well organised meeting. BJUI was represented by myself as Chairman of the Executive and by Prof Prokar Dasgupta as our new Editor. Prokar and his USICON counterparts put on a superb three hour symposium on how to organise a research project for publication. This symposium was extremely well attended with a vigorous interaction with the audience – it was very lively. In addition, Prokar had a significant input into a symposium on robotic prostatectomy as well as other scientific areas. Clearly, USICON were very pleased to see such an input into the USI from the BJUI and our attendance seemed to re-invigorate the relationship.
David Quinlan is Chairman of the BJU International Charity; Consultant Urologist at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin; Senior Lecturer in Surgery at University College, Dublin, Ireland.
BJUI Editor-in-Chief Prokar Dasgupta with Drs Rane, Kochikar and Patel at USICON
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It is an enormous privilege becoming the new Editor-in-Chief of the BJUI. As an academic it has been my ultimate dream. Thank you for this exciting opportunity to serve our readers and authors. I also wanted to express my gratitude to our editorial board and reviewers without whom this journal would not exist.
Early one morning during the BAUS annual meeting 2012, I had the great pleasure of having breakfast with John Fitzpatrick. He has done wonders with the BJUI and I wish to thank and congratulate him for his excellent leadership, international collaboration and innovative approach, which has established the journal as a global landmark in urology. I asked him to describe his most important contribution to the BJUI in one word. The answer without hesitation was ‘colour’.
John immediately asked me the same question. With equal conviction I uttered the words that would describe the BJUI in the next 5 years –’the web’.
The other day I made my usual trip to the Guy’s Hospital, King’s College London, library. I love reading the new journals as well as archived copies that are stored on the first floor. I have done so regularly for the last 10 years. On this occasion I requested our friendly librarian to guide me towards the new editions of Science and the N Engl J Med. Rather to my astonishment, she said that the first floor had been shut and there were no paper journals there anymore! Instead she directed me to a computer terminal where I could browse every scientific journal with my college user name and password. It was then that I realised that my own library had stopped subscribing to paper journals. I have since learned that many other libraries have done the same. Libraries and not urologists are the largest subscribers of the BJUI. If they do not want paper journals they are just not going to buy them.
Welcome to the green revolution.
Over the next few years it will be my mission to make the BJUI the most read surgical journal on the web. We have not made the mistake of assuming that this is what all our readers want. Therefore, while we make the transition to the web, the paper version continues, but with a few differences. We will be reducing the number of paper issues to once a month. Our readers have told us that as soon as the first edition comes out of its plastic cover, the next one arrives. This is often rather overwhelming for a busy urologist who may find it challenging to find the important messages. A direct result of reducing the number of volumes is that fewer papers will ultimately be published and the acceptance rate will fall to ~15%. A triage system has been introduced whereby papers that are not felt to be suitable for the new journal are returned immediately to the authors. This is not a reflection of the quality of the papers but reduces wastage of valuable time and allows the articles to be submitted elsewhere without delay.
The BJUI website www.bjui.org has been entirely redesigned and, in keeping with our main mission statement, I have gathered a dedicated new team of enthusiastic innovators. You will notice that unlike other journals we have Associate Editors for innovation, impact, web, social media and design. These are young urologists with unique skills allowing us to deliver the BJUI on an exciting web-based platform that will evolve continuously. I hope you can join us on this journey.
The busy modern surgeon has a short attention span. If we cannot attract them to our key messages within 30 seconds of reaching our landing page, it is unlikely that they will stay there for 3 minutes rather than go elsewhere. Extensive studies and searches on web-based metrics have made these facts obvious to me. These are the realities of modern academic publishing. The web-based journal will have a much wider readership, not just amongst urologists but also other doctors, nurses, students and most importantly patients and their families.
With this in mind we have introduced the ‘article of the week’, almost like the headline news of The Times. If most urologists read just this on their iPads or smart phones, rather than ever even look at the paper version, we have successfully made our point. This month one such article is the updated Partin tables. As a predictive tool, they are important to urologists and patients alike and will allow our readers to counsel patients about the potential outcomes after treatment of their prostate cancer.
Another new feature is the BJUI blog for immediacy, HuffPost style; the days of writing a letter to the editor that gets published a year later are no more. Instead, your opinions will be moderated and appear real time on the website. The debate will be timely, educational and enjoyable.
Social media, especially Twitter, will play an important role in highlighting the most important content and allowing rapid interaction during international meetings. We have engaged the services of a group specialising in social media and I urge you to follow the BJUI on Facebook and Twitter. Who knows ‘tweetations’ might become as important as the impact factor, one day soon.
Finally, I wanted to especially thank Francesco Montorsi for inspiring me during dinner one autumn evening in Milan, where I had been invited to review a European Union grant application. The lesson I learnt from him was humility. As the Editor-in-Chief I always remember an important tale published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ describes what happens when a vain king is paraded by two rogue weavers in his invisible new clothes through the streets of his own capital. I hope I will always manage to avoid the ‘emperor syndrome’. My job is to serve our readers and focus above all on the one thing that is of utmost importance to the BJUI – quality.
Prokar Dasgupta
I remember distinctly when the penny dropped for me. It was about 2am on a warm summer’s night in early January 2012 (apologies to those of you shivering in the Northern Hemisphere). I had my one-week old son in one arm, swinging between sleeping and spewing, and an iPad in my other hand, providing distraction between nappy changes and feeds. The sleep-deprivation had dulled my senses considerably and my brain was capable of no more than light reading.
It was then I read a piece in the New York Times online about the power of Twitter in medical communication. Previously, I thought Twitter was the domain of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian (Kim who?) and various narcissistic cricket and football players. It seemed like puerile nonsense for a generation that I no longer belonged to. However, reading this opinion piece made me think again. It was clear that there is a whole generation of significant academic clinicians, researchers and publishers who have embraced social media and who use Twitter, in particular, to disseminate their work with a speed and reach that is simply unachievable through any other medium. I was struck by various examples of how key scientific publications are first flagged on Twitter and how within hours, responses are made by key opinion leaders and these responses are again disseminated rapidly around the Twittersphere. And although none of the examples were based around urology, it was clear to me that oncologists and surgeons were getting on board the social media rollercoaster.
So between nappy changes and having wiped some baby vomit off my iPad, I logged onto Twitter and created a username. I searched for prostate cancer and urology and quickly found my way to a few key resources and super-users who seemed to have a very active Twitter presence and who were tweeting content that immediately appeared of interest to me. Within a few minutes I had identified a few highly valuable Twitter users to follow and within their lists of followers and those who they were following, I quickly built up a useful stream of tweets dropping into my timeline. And then of course, a few of these Twitterers started following me back, which was mildly exciting. Within a few days and having posted a few tweaks, I began to feel part of the Twittersphere.
As the weeks went by, I continued to be astounded by just how fast information travels on Twitter. While I get emails with the table of contents for the various journals that I subscribe to, these only drop in my inbox every few weeks. Also, because there are a number of significant journals that I do not subscribe to (non-urological mostly), there are many papers published out there that do not come immediately to my attention. Depending on which Twitter sites you follow, all key papers related to your area of interest find their way into your timeline instantaneously as soon as they are published. Not just that, very interesting comment from others also gets to you very quickly. For example, key findings in prostate cancer tend to be picked up by the major US news sites who then invite comment from key leaders in major cancer centres. A typical example is that of the PSA screening recommendations made by the United States Preventive Services Taskforce in June 2012, which provoked huge controversy. Twitter came to life and key opinion leaders such as Matt Cooperberg (@cooperberg_ucsf) helped drive the conversation through Twitter and blogs (e.g.The Huffington Post blog) at lightning speed. These comments get tweeted out and responses to these comments also get blogged and within hours of a paper being published you have news of the paper, expert comment and wider reaction…… all in 140 characters or less!
And while none of us have much time in the day to add an extra task, I find that waiting for my coffee in the morning or while the resident puts an arterial line in my next patient, there are a few spare moments in the day where the Twitter app on my iPhone comes to life. Twitter is perfectly suited to the smart phone user and that is where the majority of tweets around the world are generated from. It is also perfectly suited for one of the other very exciting areas in which I have seen Twitter play a very useful role – that of conferencing. At the EAU in Paris, a small but energetic group of Twitter users started tweeting content from various sessions at this large meeting and started engaging with other Twitter users around the world. For me, I believe conferencing is about to be transformed by the power of social media but more about that soon.
For now, at the new BJUI, we want to grow the audience and get you all to join the conversation. Through Twitter, blogging, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms, we are building for the future of communication in urology. The next generation of trainees will be deeply embedded in all of these platforms and will expect to be engaged through them. We are entering a new generation of medical communication – come join the conversation.
Declan Murphy
@declangmurphy
Declan Murphy is Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Surgery, University of Melbourne, St Vincent’s Hospital and Director of Robotic Surgery at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He had previously been consultant urological surgeon at Guys & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London.
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Introducing the new BJUI: ”The most read surgical journal on the web”, Prokar Dasgupta, BJUI Editor-in-Chief.
Listen to find out how to record your own Podcast for BJUI.
An interview with John M. Fitzpatrick
BJUI December 2012, Volume 110, Issue 11
‘Face to Face’ is an interview with personalities in the urology field. As a successor to BJUI’s ‘Conversations’ feature, ‘Face to Face’ is fashioned after the highly acclaimed BBC television series of the same name where former British politician John Freeman interviewed famous men and women with an insightful and probing style.
In this edition of ‘Face to Face’, BJUI Associate Editor Roger Kirby (and a former ‘Face to Face’ interviewee), turns the tables and interviews John M. Fitzpatrick, MCh, FRCSI, FEBU, FRCS, in honour of 10 years of service as outgoing Editor-in-Chief of BJUI. After serving for 25 years as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Dublin and University College Dublin, where he also received his medical school training, John is now head of research at the Irish Cancer Society. His list of medals, awards, prizes, and honorary degrees are simply too numerous to mention. This year, he was named Honorary Fellow of the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand and received the Distinguished Career Award from the Société Internationale d’Urologie. His visiting professorships, invited lectures, and charitable work has taken him to the four corners of the world.
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