BJS Academy SoMe Review January 2022

The omicron wave turned January 2022 into a difficult time for surgeons in Western Europe. A high accumulated incidence, the sharp increase in the number of cases, backlogs and delays, and shortage of operating theatre personnel had a tremendous impact on hospitals and surgical departments. However, twitterers in the surgical Twittersphere were particularly active during January 2022.

Dmitri Nepogodiev was involved in many engaging conversations on January 1^st. He shared the results of a Twitter poll about peer reviewers’ behaviour. Interestingly, 56% of 140 participants opined that reviewers occasionally asked them to add citations in the manuscript to their own articles. Is this an appropriate behaviour for a reviewer? What do editors think?

On January 3rd, Giovani Marchegiani @Gio_Marchegiani tweeted about a long-debated issue: nasogastric tubes after pancreatoduodenectomy. Based on the findings of a meta-analysis published in @BJSOpen, Giovani stated that the routine use of NG tubes is associated with poorer results and reminded his followers that @ErasSociety policies should be the standard of care. You can read the #openaccess paper published in @BJSOpen if you click on this link https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsopen/zrab111

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 attracted a lot of attention from surgeons. Aneel Bhangu @anellbhangu, Gabriella Morley @gabriellamorely, and Dmitri Nepogodiev @dnepo addressed important questions related to Omicron during an online meeting held on Jan 18^th via zoom.

On January 16^th, Marc Besselink shared through his Twitter account @MarcBesselink a summary of the results of the Dutch PEANUTS II multicentre randomized non-inferiority clinical trial of antibiotic prophylaxis in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis, which was had been published in @BJSurgery. The take-home message is that antibiotic prophylaxis reduces the surgical site infection rate from 12.1% to 5.3%. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjs/znab441

Shortly after, on January 20, 2002, Carly Bisset @CBizzle1 announced on Twitter that her work on the Plato project @plato_project had been shortlisted by the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, a strategic partner of the BJS society, for the @BJSurgery Prize. In 2022, the Annual Meeting of the @ASGBI will be held in Liverpool. Congratulations, Carly!

Environmental sustainability is a fundamental component of value-based surgery. @CovidSurg, the global collaborative, launched a leading initiative on Twitter on January 25^th, aimed at developing a “Green Surgery Toolkit” through a consensus process.

On the last day of the month, Marylise Boutros @BoutrosMarylise congratulated Sami Chadi @Schadi_CRS and Fayez A. Quereshy @QuereshyMD of the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto on the publication in @BJSurgery of their study showing that neoadjuvant therapy improves negative resection margin rate compared with direct to surgery in T4 colon tumors. This is the link to the paper https://doi.org/10.1093/bjs/znab382

Finally, we share a rather detailed analysis of the activity of the @BJSurgery and @BJSOpen communities during January 2022 with Twitonomy.

Between January 1st and 31st, 2022, 174 tweets including the handle @BJSurgery were posted on Twitter. Ninety-two of them were original and 82 (47%) were retweets. Overall, twenty hashtags were used.

During the same period (January 1^st to 31st, 2022), 24 tweets including @BJSOpen were posted. Twenty of them were original and 4 (17%) were retweets. Many more hashtags (75) were included in @BJSOpen tweets.