Building a Sense of Community Through Digital Scholarship
Author: Gabriela Azevedo Sansoni
Keywords: digital scholarship, #womeninmedicine, research, translation, outreach
For those who are not familiar with the Digital Scholarship term, a very Wikipedian definition is “The use of digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve scholarly and research goals.”
It is not uncommon to have co-authors meet in social media, especially Facebook groups for professional researchers. There are also survey researches with entire protocols written around sharing the questionnaire via social media, or even the direct use of metadata to determine risks of getting a certain disease based on your location.
The number of peer-review publications on the use of social media, hashtags and engagement among healthcare professionals, written by the very same focus group, grows everyday. These are non-traditional facilitated ways into academia for aspiring physician-researchers, as well as a new niche of study for already reputable academics.
More than a few of these studies highlight the importance of networking, mentorship and advocacy for gender equity in Medicine and Surgery. A non-exhaustive list of some examples that caught my attention in the past few months is found below.
Even if I am not active in social media, I still try to find space online to get engaged and contribute to creating a sense of community in academia and Medicine.
A big community with many speciality groups is Cochrane, you might have heard of it as they are quite big in systematic research. In the Cochrane platform there is a point-based membership, so you need to accumulate points to be a member, there are no options of paying a fee or using your credentials to automatically become a member. The only other ways of becoming a member is working for them or having what they call an “outstanding contribution to Cochrane over many years.” Basically, they have a portal called TaskExchange where you can sign up for tasks, and post tasks for others to fulfill. This gamification of the process makes it fun and rewarding to contribute to real science.
There are different ways of contributing to Cochrane TaskExchange, you can give Expert Opinions and Consumer Input, translate articles, join reviews, etc.
In order to give consumer input you are usually required to be a patient yourself or have a personal relationship with someone who is a patient. More obviously, expert tasks require expertise and translation requires language knowledge. Note that not all tasks posted are for Cochrane Reviews, some are just from individual researchers looking for collaboration.
Regardless of my somewhat limited medical student skillset I was able to connect with scholars and researchers and contribute to science.
I was a consumer reviewer once, the process was very straightforward and efficient. It happened through a survey. In addition, I usually volunteer to translate articles in Portuguese and Italian to English. Although, my favorite experience was when I was able to translate an article from the 60`s originally in Dutch to English. Dutch is my 4th language so I was already excited about this challenge, but what made it more interesting was to see how academic writing was different back then. There wasn't such a rigid structure and when citing other articles it sounded more like mentioning a friend who ran a similar experiment in a neighboring country.
Another nice initiative I came across just after joining Cochrane was EvidenceAid (evidenceaid.org). EvidenceAid aims to bring the general public closer to evidence-based information contained in (most of the time) Systematic Reviews via short communications and summaries of the studies, available for free. They have collections on different topics (e.g. Earthquakes, COVID-19, Zika, Health Systems Resilience, etc) and are currently working on having it all translated in many different languages. A lot of the work is done via volunteers and interns. I recently signed up to join their small team that is updating the Malnutrition Collection and I am currently navigating how it works.
So, if you are not a fan of social media like me or if you just want an extra layer of privacy you can still benefit from the amazing perks of Digital Scholarship.
About the author: Gabriela Azevedo Sansoni is a 4th year student at the International Medical School University of Milan and research assistant at the UMC Utrecht for over one year. She coordinates different projects with her peers that aim to bring surgery closer to medical students, she is president and founder of the Association of Women Surgeons University of Milan Chapter (instagram: @ausunim) and InciSioN Italy.
