A tweet a day keeps ignorance away

Dear Editor,

Indian Journal of Anaesthesia (IJA) is showing a steady improvement under the aegis of many renowned editors over the past few years. The new editorial board has continued the legacy and introduced a fresh zeal into it. In the recent past, IJA has published several articles repeatedly emphasising the pivotal methodological aspects, including trial registration, the need to be honest while reporting undesired ‘negative’ outcomes, and adherence to reporting items while preparing the manuscript.[1,2,3] Over the last few years, there has been a considerable shift towards more complex methodology and statistical analysis in the medical literature. Understanding a trial requires a deeper understanding of many of these intricacies. A lack of clarity of research methodology often keeps the residents at bay while aspiring for publications.[4] With the rapid evolution of evidence-based medicine, it is also exceedingly becoming necessary for clinicians and general readers to stay updated by reading the recent literature. It is heartening to see IJA extending resourceful guidance and help to the readers, by and large, through these articles.

Another latest improvement has been the rejuvenated Twitter handle of IJA, which posts regular updates about the latest articles. In simple illustrative infographics, the main findings of the particular report are lucidly summarised in a single page. Such one-pagers are quite helpful for a quick overview of the articles and the relevant take-home messages for new-generation anaesthesiologists. The engaging tweets contain concise summaries of various articles and percolate widely through the academic community worldwide. The real-time conversations with researchers from across the globe help the author get unbiased and precise feedback. This is only sometimes plausible in the limited scope of a letter to the editor and the journal's response section. In the era of strong social media, where almetrics and PlumX metrics are gradually being recognised as meaningful yardsticks to measure the scientific impact of an article, an active Twitter handle is quite a welcoming step. Traditional bibliometric indices such as Impact Factor (IF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Citescore and so on for journals and the h-index and the g-index for authors predominantly rely on the number of citations. Therefore, these indicators are plagued with the inability to reflect the real-time attention the article or the journal garners. Even if there is much discussion about one article, unless it is getting cited by other authors in another research, these scores will not improve. Almetrics, on the other hand, evaluates the number of ‘shares’ and ‘views’ across both general (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and scholarly social media platforms (LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.). Despite the concern that almetrics can be easily manipulated, its acceptability and application continue to increase in a crescendo.[5] The tweets by the IJA handle can, therefore, help the journal and the authors, who can enrich their curriculum vitae with an improved almetric score. This timely stride will make IJA the destination for further high-quality research in our understanding. We express our heartiest congratulations to the new editorial board and hope to advance more towards the field of impactful research through its guidance.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.