The team at The Lancet consulted 100 authors, readers, doctors and clinicians - or 'development partners' - to find out what users wanted, and the result is a much cleaner and easier to use website. In the new design, The Lancet journals The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, The Lancet Oncology, and The Lancet Neurology are now all accessible and searchable from a single website.
In a special podcast to accompany the launch, the Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton outlines his favourite features:
"The most exciting things about The Lancet's new site for me are first, we have the possibility for internet television ... in the YouTube would that we live in I think that's immensely important for communication, especially in health when you've got some pretty difficult concepts sometimes. And secondly, I think we're also able to convey the personality of The Lancet in ways that we've never been able to before: the idea that we're publishing research, educational material, and also opinion."The new video functionality is showcast TheLancet.com Story, a very flashy and professional-looking production in which members of the journal staff and Dr Anne Szarewski, clinical consultant at Cancer Research UK and one of the development partners, discuss what the new website means to them. The Lancet hopes that in the future users will be able to submit their own medical videos to the site.
Richard Horton boasts that the website has "the best search engine in medicine", and certainly it's an awful lot faster than the search on the previous incarnation. Importantly, the search results include not only results from The Lancet family of journals, but also all relevant results in Medline, a life sciences and biomedical publication database run by the US National Library of Medicine.
Articles now include links to related material as well as social bookmarking tools, including parent company Elsevier's 2Collab social networking tool. In addition, online community features are planned, including social networking, debates, wikis and discussion boards.On the editorial side of things, original research articles now include drop-down Editors' Notes within the table of contents - 2 or 3 sentences that summarize what is important about the research - while journal homepages feature three articles that represent the Editor's choice. The news aspect of the website has been expanded with the inclusion of 'This Week in Medicine', short paragraph-long summaries of what has been going on in medicine worldwide. Specialty-based online collections comprising content from across The Lancet family of journals will launch in the near future, one mooted project being a cardiology portal.
I think the new version of TheLancet.com is a vast improvement on the previous website, not least because it is so much easier to navigate and doesn't trip you up with sign-ins every 5 minutes. The site also looks far crisper, in stark contrast to it's cluttered forebear. I'm more into text than multimedia so I'm not fussed about using the new video content, but it's certainly very impressive and a new direction for The Lancet.
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