Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.

Publishing

• First up are two articles about commenting. The Ringer has a piece about ‘how the New York Times Cooking became the best comments section on the Internet‘ by calling the section Notes. ““The call to action was to leave a note on the recipe that helps make it better. That’s very different from ‘Leave a comment on a recipe.’”  PLOS, on the other hand, are struggling to attract comments. A new study in the Journal of Information Science found “that publishers are yet to encourage significant numbers of readers to leave comments, with implications for the effectiveness of commenting as a means of collecting and communicating community perceptions of an article’s importance.” (H/T: InfoDocket). Perhaps a tweak to the wording asking for notes rather than comments might help?

• On the Altmetric.com blog Shenmeng Xu explores how WeChat’s design and other factors influence how academic research is shared and how this affects the volume and nature of WeChat-sourced altmetrics.
• Successful results from the EULAR Network (EMEUNET) peer reviewer mentoring trial in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases .  (We can provide more information for any group who wants to learn more, and welcome any feedback on improvements resulting from uptake by other journals.)
• Our RCT on the effect of various COI statements on readers’ confidence in educational articles has just been published in BMJ Open. The study found that “Doctors’ confidence in educational articles was not influenced by the COI statements
• The BBC Visual and Data Journalism team explain how they have used R’s ggplot2 package to create production-ready charts and share what they learned along the way.

Innovation

•  Andrew Plume challenges publishers to question the traditions and myths of scholarly publishing to drive innovation in an editorial in the new issue of Learned Publishing. “In this era of disruptive change in the scientific and scholarly publishing industry, reflecting similar change in the world of research and with a backdrop of wider shifts in society and technology globally, we must question the status quo.”
• The Global Editors Network looks into the daily lives of Tristan Ferne, BBC Research & Development, and Kourtney Bitterly, The New York Times Research & Development, to find out more about their upcoming work, and in what direction they see the future of news heading.

• Luke Bellamy on the Pirate Code and experimenting at the FT
• Ian Mulvany, Head of Product Innovation at SAGE Publishing, talking about lean product innovation at the Rave Publishing Conference 2018
• Graham Kenny writes about how Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers in HBR.