Blogs and Twitter in medical publications - too unreliable to quote, or a change waiting to happen?

Abstract

With the ubiquitous connectivity offered by the Internet, social media sites (like Twitter and Facebook) and personal publishing platforms (blogs) are proliferating rapidly. In this new, evolving scenario of social media, these tools become an important medium to disseminate information at a lightning speed. However, the conventional medical publication model is less than eager to regard them as equivalent to traditional modes of information dissemination. In this article we examine the role played by social media as a critic of the medical publication system, and how it acts as a safeguard by building a platform for post-publication peer review.