My blog cited in JAMA Surgery paper: Progress for bloggers

About a year and a half ago, I blogged that a medical student on Twitter used a blog post of mine as evidence. In January, the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia published an article I wrote under my pseudonym called “Why I blog and tweet.”

Last month, medical blogging took another step toward legitimacy. A JAMA Surgery Viewpoint formally cited my post critiquing the Finnish randomized trial of antibiotics versus surgery for the treatment of acute appendicitis.

Here is the first page with the portion of the piece discussing what I had written in the blog post.

Click on figure to enlarge.

Here is how citation appears in the JAMA Surgery article.

If you haven't read my entire post about the randomized trial, click here.

Last year I said this: “Journals may have to adapt and become more like blogs. In the future, medical information may be disseminated by blogs and comments rather than journal articles and letters to the editor.”

We have already seen prominent publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine starting online forums and the BMJ hosting blogs (at least 36 so far) and rapid responses to published papers.

The sea change in the way medical research is disseminated may be happening sooner than I thought.