In October, @bjsurgery generated 361 900 impressions, 511 retweets and 1000 likes, and gained 489 new followers.

The tweet from the BJS account with the highest number of engagements, including over 11 000 impressions, was about an RCT of laparoscopic sentinel node navigation surgery versus laparoscopic gastrectomy with lymph node dissection for early gastric cancer1. The top tweet mentioning BJS was from the COVIDSurg Collaborative, on their important research letter proposing that delaying surgery for at least 4 weeks after a positive COVID swab may help minimize pulmonary complications and mortality2.

The paper with the highest Altmetric score that was published in October was by Ielpo et al. on the global attitudes in the management of acute appendicitis during the COVID-19 pandemic3. In addition, in October Justin Davies (@jdcamcolorectal)4, Jenna Morgan (@BreastSurgeon)5, Víctor Soria Aledo @victorsoria656, Julio Mayol (@juliomayol)7 and Mohamed Abu Hilal (@Abuhilal9Abu) all shared on Twitter their high Altmetric score certificates for their high-impact papers.

BJS posted a visual abstract on Twitter, Instagram and the Cutting Edge blog, about the Clean Cut study on the effects of an adaptive, multimodal surgical infection prevention programme for low-resource settings8.

In October, the BJS Cutting Edge blog posted plain English summaries on the reducing mortality from abdominal aortic aneurysms across EU15+ countries since 19909, and how the first COVID-19 wave affected UK vascular services10. As many countries approach their second wave of COVID-19 and head into further lockdown restrictions, the safety of the surgical colleagues of BJS remain in the thoughts of the BJS editorial staff.