What we read this week (12 July)

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

Publishing

• Atypon have put together a video presentation to highlight the awesome work they are doing to accelerate content discovery. It’s a great overview of how machine learning technology is being used in scholarly publishing.
• A new analysis suggests that journal articles posted as preprints before their formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal attract more citations and online mentions than those without preprint versions. Nature Index has some nice interactive graphs showing the citation boost.
• Julie Zhu writes about the challenges involved in content discovery management in  Building Pipes and Fixing Leaks: Demystifying and Decoding Scholarly Information Discovery & Interchange on Scholarly Kitchen.

Product development and innovation

• A nice suite of product lifecycle ‘how to’ guides and tools from Marc Abraham. [H/T: @IanMulvany]

• How the FT.com team improved our documentation to 95% usefulness in 7 hours* is a fantastic description of the FT’s Documentation Day and all of the planning work that went into making this day a success.

• Greg Satell on 3 Cognitive Biases Can Kill Innovation: “Whether that is through a formal process like pre-mortems and red teams, or simply seeking out a fresh pair of eyes, we need to avoid believing everything we think.”

Technology

• • Jeremy Wright MP, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the Government’s latest initiative to support the tech for good movement. “The Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology (CAST) has officially launched The Catalyst this week, supported by a £1.6 million grant from DCMS. This network will seek to establish a hub of support for charities, helping them access trusted digital skills and expertise, develop strong digital understanding among leadership and develop new products and services for their stakeholders.”
  • CB Insights have created two interesting infographics. The first is a visual timeline showing every $1B+ acquisition made by a FAMGA company.  [H/T: Kathy Sandler]The second is a heatmap looking at AI startup deals categorized by industry showing that healthcare applications are hot:
  • Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms.  Lily Davies, Digital Humanities MA/MSc student, UCL has also written a review of how social media data is being used by social science researchers.
  • Gabrielle Bufrem talks about digital transformation in the following video.  “Every company today is a tech company. If you think you’re not, then I’m sorry but you’re dying”. Write up by Graeme Goulden on Mind the Product.

 

And finally…

• Katie Sehl writes about Canadian doctors prescribing a visit to the art museum for patients to reduce stress and anxiety and increase feelings of well-being. In a partnership between the Médecins Francophones du Canada (MFdC) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts physicians have been given prescription slips that patients can present at the ticket booth for entry.  Which reminds me that the Barbican has an exhibition on at the moment called AI: More than Human that looks like it’s worth a visit. The website claims,“this major centre-wide ‘festival-style’ exhibition explores creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. Bringing together artists, scientists and researchers, this interactive exhibition offers an unprecedented survey of AI with which you are invited to engage head-on.”