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Getting Ready for Journal Club: Twitter Basics

In order to participate in Journal Club you will need to get acquainted with Twitter. If you have never used Twitter I encourage you to check out Twitter 101: How Should I Get Started Using Twitter. Once you feel comfortable with the basics (and hey, I’m happy to be your guinea pig–just use @ForensicHealth in your test message and I will be sure to see it), it’s time to start familiarizing yourself with some basics for participating in Twitter Journal Club.

I think there are a few essentials when it comes to participating in Twitter Journal Club:

Use the hashtag. The designated hashtag will allow anyone participating to see your tweet. The hashtag for our Journal Club is #ForensicJC.

Dive in. It’s a great opportunity to ask questions or look for resources, even if you don’t feel comfortable putting your own opinion out there. There are many ways to participate and it should be a back and forth, not just a series of declarative statements. Even chiming in with your agreement on a point is a valuable contribution to the conversation, as are real world examples of issues we may discuss in the article (along with real world solutions, which are even better).

Use a specialty site like TweetDeck or TweetChat to make the conversation easier to follow. It will filter out extraneous “noise” from unrelated posts that may be distracting.

Be collegial. Disagreeing during Journal Club is completely acceptable. Being disrespectful in voicing your disagreement is not. Journal Club is meant to enhance everyone’s knowledge and capacity to better serve our patients, not to shame or embarrass others. So please–don’t be a dick.

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Having a hard time imagining what a chat like this looks like? Check out this archived chat on child sex abuse from NSVRC to get a sense of how things will look for Journal Club.