Medical scientific conferences and social networks: How Russian physicians share professional knowledge?

BACKGROUND: Physicians who attend international conferences cover their content on social media. Such posts generate an active response and discussion in the comments involving other physicians. Attending all conferences when they are held simultaneously is impossible; therefore, brief communications that capture the essence of a missed presentation are in demand, generate an immediate response, and quickly raise awareness of new clinical research and scientific data. This phenomenon was not studied in Russia. However, the posts were analyzed and the activity and interest among Russian physicians were evident.

AIM: To investigate how frequently Russian physicians use available social networks to share information from scientific conferences with their colleagues.

METHODS: The search for posts for the last 4–12 months in Russian social networks such as VKontakte (vk.com), VrachiRF (vrachirf.ru), and Doctor na rabote (doktornarabote.ru) by “report”, “conference”, “congress”, “symposium”, and “medical conference” keywords was conducted. The selected recordings were classified into 6 categories (conference announcements; reports of past conferences without disclosing the content; professional journalistic reports, disclosing the content; reports from physicians, disclosing the content; videos of reports with disclosure; videos of reports without disclosure) and counted (1373 posts in total). However, the category “Reports from physicians revealing the content of some selected parts of the report and facts and ideas presented in the report” was given special attention due to useful information from the conferences and a reason to discuss in the comments. In addition, relevant studies by authors from other countries were analyzed and compared with our results.

RESULTS: A total of 1,373 posts (searched by keywords), of which 65 were in the category “Reports from physicians revealing the content of some selected parts of the report and facts and ideas presented in the report” was reviewed. The number of such posts is limited; however, this information is of interest to physicians (high number of views and dozens of comments). By comparison, the number of such messages in other countries may reach into the hundreds at a single conference alone. Based on foreign experience, the discussion of the reports on social networks helps both to spread new knowledge and facilitate joint learning and interaction among physicians, which contributes to the generation of useful material that passed peer review. Possible reasons for the low number of such posts on Russian social networks are as follows: mostly messages and discussions take place on professional social networks (VrachiRF and Doctor na rabote), foreign organizers actively encourage participants to use social networks with conference hashtags, and the multimillion-speaking English-speaking audience encourages authors to write more posts with their feedback.

CONCLUSIONS: Physicians quite rarely share facts presented at Russian scientific medical conferences on Russian social networks. However, users of social networks show considerable interest and actively discuss such posts. The study of this phenomenon will enable the assessment and effective use of its educational potential.