A successful first year for #ResNetSLT

Our monthly Twitter #ResNetSLT Journal Club which began in January 2016 has been a great success.

Nine papers have been discussed during the year, with up to 47 participants being involved in the chats.

Please click here for a summary of the papers discussed and the stats of the impact and reach to linked Twitter accounts.

The highest to date was almost 750,000 accounts from a one hour Tweetchat.

The engagement with our online Journal Club has shown that geography is no barrier, with people joining us from Australia as well as several countries in mainland Europe.

We've also been delighted that people from many other professions have joined our discussions – and that's the message that everyone is welcome.

On several occasions the paper authors have joined the discussions – a feature that we hope to continue next year.

Each month we've either chosen an open access paper, or been able to negotiate with the relevant publishers for them to provide a direct link to our selected paper. Many thanks to all the publishers who've generously helped us with this.

We've posted this on our blogsite, along with a summary of what the paper says, and questions to prompt discussion and debate.

After the Tweetchats we've also posted a summary of the key discussion themes onto our news feed on the blogsite, as we want to share these messages as widely as possible, especially for colleagues who are not (yet) on Twitter.

In February we were delighted that the ResNetSLT blogsite was awarded 'Site of the Month' by Professor Caroline Bowen (@speech_woman).

Our first #ResNet_Rendevous took place in August – that was an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting for colleagues attending the International Association of Phoniatrics and Logopedics (IALP) conference in Dublin.

Tweeting live from that conference event also proved to be a really great way for others to keep updated if they weren't able to attend themselves. It would be great to do this again in the future – please let us know your suggestions.

Thanks to everyone for joining in, it's been an exciting first year and we've learned a lot about online discussion events. Hopefully we will continue to refine and improve the #ResNetSLT chats.

A special word of thanks is due to Dr Joanne Fillingham and Dr Emma Pagnamenta for all their help in getting us started, as well as @RCSLTResearch.

If you have any suggestions for papers you'd like to discuss please let us know.