Abstract
Never begin with an apology, they say.
So I am proud to announce that I was mistaken in a previous editorial that stated we had finally published the last paper from my inherited backlog of accepted, but not yet published, articles. It seems to be a feature of the online publishing scenario that occasionally no-one notices a paper, having made its appearance in PubMed, failing to make its way to the printed journal. Even the author. This issue’s assessment of diagnostic laparoscopy in abdominal pain was accepted back in April 2016. Oddly, it took rather a long time to appear on PubMed, as well as slipping through the non-finely-meshed electronic nets carrying such articles to the written page.
It is not the only foible of online publishing that has caught my attention. Like many, I do much of my newspaper-reading online. And am becoming increasingly aware that I tend to read the articles that are “trending”, prominently highlighted as among the ten pieces most accessed by my fellow readers. Even in some “quality” papers, this shows an alarming preponderance of football stories, though recently various manifestations of Brexit and “Scot Free” have taken central stage. But it does rather seem that I am reading what other people are telling me to.
Normally, when I read a real newspaper, I look at every page. Even those usually outside my normal interests can be quickly scanned for anything that catches my eye. But that doesn’t happen online. I have to go “searching” for anything not trending, and since I am not going to click on every subsection of the drop-down menu, this is inevitably limiting my choices. Bizarrely, I find I rarely click on “Health”, despite an obvious interest. Same with “education”. Nor even “sport”; and if I do, I will not be clicking through football, then rugby, then cricket (yeah!), golf, tennis… as separate manoeuvres, taking five times as long as does a quick visual scan of Page 18.
And medical journals are arguably the same. In the past, they dropped through your home-or-away letterbox, and you read/scanned them – front to back. Now, both The Lancet and the BMJ send me weekly emails, and I click on the papers they tell me are interesting (spookily, only one of them lets me read them). I am sure The Lancet has a table of contents somewhere, but I certainly have not skimmed down it recently, to see if there is something unusual that I want to read. If I, like many, use the search engine to find my “favourites”, that simply reinforces the narrowing of my visual fields (subconscious metaphor after being pushed today towards a glaucoma paper…where I believed I had spotted an error, and it took me 25 minutes to re-find how to contact the journal). And I am not sure that is a good thing.
So, in case you do not Google “Speedboat Vertebral Fractures” at any point this Summer, we headline a paper describing particular fractures seen in untrained tourists – but not in the locals - taking to holiday speedboats in Malta. The “archive paper” cited above follows in its wake, before a Scottish District General Hospital looks at the accuracy of clinical staff’s “blind” estimation of a patient’s weight – the time-honoured technique for recalibration of a 70 kg man’s dosage schedule; a paper whose roots lay, I believe, in a coffee-room debate as to who was best. An ophthalmological survey of the incidence of idiopathic intra-cranial hypertension in Fife completes the Original Articles/Research section.
Non-surgeons among us should be immediately intrigued by the very mention of “dropped gallstones” in the title of the first case report, and wonder where they might end up. That paper is, in fact, a small case series, whilst the next describes perhaps the first case of optic atrophy with a new generation taxane, previously considered “safer” in that regard, for prostatic carcinoma. Rheumatologists will welcome yet another diagnosis – this time Henoch-Schönlein Purpura – for other practitioners to enlist their help in the use of methotrexate, before we reach our rapidly-becoming-traditional quirky diagnostic conundrum. A patient presents with severe eye trauma after a relatively minor fall. More than once…