Academic information on Twitter: A user survey

Exploring mental health literacy on twitter: A machine learning approach

OBJECTIVES

This study investigates whether reducing mental illness stigma, enhancing help-seeking efficacy, and maintaining positive mental health mediate the relationship between the recognition of mental disorders and help-seeking attitudes.

METHODS

During annotation phase, Twitter were collected data from April to August 2022. Tweets were retrieved using keywords aligned with five mental health literacy (MHL) facets: maintaining positive mental health (M), recognizing mental disorders (R), reducing mental illness stigma (S), help-seeking attitude (HA), and help-seeking efficacy (HE). A pretrained Sentence-BERT model generated embedding vectors for classification tasks, achieving 0.85 precision and 0.88 accuracy. Tweets from November 2021 to December 2022 were organized into three time points: R at Time 1; M, S, and HE at Time 2; and HA at Time 3. In total, 4,471,951 tweets from 941 users were analyzed. Structural equation modeling was employed to examine the temporal relationships among MHL components.

RESULTS

Single mediation models indicated that better recognition of mental disorders is associated with more favorable maintenance of positive mental health, greater help-seeking efficacy, and lower mental illness stigma-all of linked to more positive help-seeking attitudes. However, in the multiple mediation model, the reduction of mental illness stigma did not significantly mediate the relationship between the recognition of mental disorders and help-seeking attitudes.

CONCLUSIONS

This findings suggest that recognizing mental disorders influences help-seeking attitudes through mediators like help-seeking efficacy and positive mental health maintenance. These results provide valuable insights for future interventions and policies aimed at promoting help-seeking behaviors and advancing mental health literacy.

Food Access in New York City During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Social Media Monitoring Study

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated issues of poverty and food insecurity in New York City, and many residents experienced difficulty accessing available resources to help them get food on the table. Social media presents an opportunity to observe and understand the barriers people face in accessing affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to explore the food access discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter (subsequently rebranded as X) in New York City by analyzing publicly available tweets posted from March 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021.

METHODS

Tweets posted by individuals in New York City during the first 13 months of the COVID-19 pandemic were collected using the observation platform Talkwalker. We categorized a list of multiple keywords into related groups (search strings). Data were cleaned to keep only tweets relevant to food insecurity and food access in New York City and remove duplicate tweets. The software Botometer was used to remove accounts considered to be bots. Topic modeling was used to group these tweets into relevant themes, which were analyzed. The top viral tweets (ie, tweets that received the highest number of retweets in New York City) from this period were further analyzed.

RESULTS

We identified 6 major themes (with subthemes) that emerged from the analysis (in order of popularity): community efforts, public assistance programs, grocery shopping and food workers, school foods, millions go hungry, and food justice. Interesting terms that emerged from the data were also identified. Overall, quantities of tweets increased in correlation with current events, such as the closure of New York City public schools; the expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits; the proliferation of mutual aid groups in the spring of 2020; and the May Day Instacart, Amazon, and Target strike in 2020.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings revealed that in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter users in New York City quickly responded to the wave of need by sharing information and resources about food access in their communities. Some users turned to Twitter to either solicit or offer help finding food. Furthermore, the platform lent itself to many conversations about the policies enacted on a federal, state, and city level to help feed New Yorkers in need. Future research on this topic should include an analysis of social media posting on platforms such as Facebook, as well as languages other than English. Results from this type of research can provide information to community leaders and elected officials to better address future crises.

Differences in psychologists' cognitive traits are associated with scientific divides

Scientific research is often characterized by schools of thought. We investigate whether these divisions are associated with differences in researchers' cognitive traits such as tolerance for ambiguity. These differences may guide researchers to prefer different problems, tackle identical problems in different ways, and even reach different conclusions when studying the same problems in the same way. We surveyed 7,973 researchers in psychological sciences and investigated links between what they research, their stances on open questions in the field, and their cognitive traits and dispositions. Our results show that researchers' stances on scientific questions are associated with what they research and with their cognitive traits. Further, these associations are detectable in their publication histories. These findings support the idea that divisions in scientific fields reflect differences in the researchers themselves, hinting that some divisions may be more difficult to bridge than suggested by a traditional view of data-driven scientific consensus.

Association of Twitter author Altmetric patterns with research impact in ophthalmology

PURPOSE

Twitter has become increasingly popular within academia due to ease of use in disseminating accurate medical information, networking with colleagues, and promoting research. Given the rapidly increasing presence of ophthalmologists on social media platforms, we determined how Twitter patterns amongst authors, institutions, and journals affects the academic impact of ophthalmology research articles.

METHODS

Data from 1086 research articles in the top 7 ophthalmology journals as determined by SCimago Journal Rank (SJR) was recorded for 2021 issues. Article citations, article captures, and Twitter metrics were retrospectively recorded using the Scopus database and PlumX Metrics on Scopus.

RESULTS

The number of citations and captures original research articles received had a significant positive correlation with the total tweets and retweets in general as well as self-tweets by authors of the article (p < 0.0001). Furthermore, articles tweeted by at least one author had a 1.7 fold increase in citations (p = 0.0012). While there was no significant effect on citations when a senior author or middle author tweeted about the publication, we observed a significantly greater number of citations when a first author tweeted about the publication (p = 0.0329). Both the author's affiliated institution and the journal tweeting about a publication were associated with more citations for that article (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.0025, respectively) and captures for that article (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.0025, respectively).

DISCUSSIONS

Twitter mentions of ophthalmology articles may reflect their future academic impact. Authors of recent ophthalmology publications, ophthalmology journals, academic institutions may benefit from promoting research articles on Twitter to increase visibility and citations.

Assessing the visibility and public engagement of bone marrow and stem cell transplantation research: An altmetric analysis

Background

Bone marrow and stem cell transplantation have led to significant advancements in modern medicine, offering potential cures for various hematological disorders and specific cancers. This study aims to investigate and analyze research in this field using altmetrics in a world outside the academic scholarly and publishing environment.

Methods

This study examines articles in the field of bone marrow and stem cell transplantation in a ten-year period (2013-2022) extracted from the Web of Science database. The Altmetric Explorer database and tool were used to extract data. After an initial review of the data for their completeness and accuracy, the study considered descriptive reports, statistical analyses, bibliometric network analysis, and overlaps between articles, journals, and research centers in terms of the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and citations using Excel, SPSS, Python, R, and VOSviewer.

Result

This study evaluated 12924 articles published in 293 journals. Findings show that 85.67% of the articles were mentioned at least once on various social media and their tools. The AAS varied between 0 and 1125, and the median of this score was 2. The highest score was assigned to an article that provides critical insights into the outcomes of patients with refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Mendeley, X (formerly Twitter), and News were the most important and active social tools, respectively, where these articles were mentioned. The highest number of tweets, news stories, Facebook posts, and policy documents were from the USA, USA, USA, and UK, respectively. The @PaperbirdsM and @MayoClinic accounts on X had the highest tweet and follower statistics, respectively. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center also had the highest number of mentions on social networks. Network analysis maps of the top AAS articles showed "Stem Cell Transplantation" as the most popular author keyword, with Blood having the most influence at the journal level, the USA at the country level, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center at the research center level, and Kenneth C. Anderson at the author level. Finally, the results of the tests showed a significant correlation between citation and Altmetric indicators/AAS. However, nor were there differences in AAS based on the open access status of articles or the journal quartile.

Conclusion

A high percentage of articles in this field are present on social networks and platforms. Furthermore, highly cited articles on social media have attracted more attention. Both traditional and web-based metrics offer different perspectives on scholarly impact. While each provides valuable insights, further research is needed to explore how these metrics can be effectively combined for a more comprehensive evaluation of scientific outputs.

Perceived impact of physiotherapy-related debates on the social platform "X" on physiotherapists' professional development and knowledge acquisition: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

In Saudi Arabia, the social media platform "X" (formerly known as "Twitter") is widely utilized by healthcare professionals. This study aimed to assess the perceived impact of physiotherapy-related debates on X on the professional development and knowledge acquisition of physiotherapists.

METHODS

A cross-sectional, online survey-based study was conducted among licensed physiotherapists in Saudi Arabia. The study followed established international reporting guidelines, including the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology, Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys, and Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys.

RESULTS

A total of 188 physiotherapists participated, with the majority (n = 143;76.1%) actively using X. Many participants indicated positive impacts on their perspectives or approaches to physiotherapy, enhancement of their critical thinking skills, and acquisition of new knowledge or insights (n = 73; 51.0% agreed, n = 26; 18.2% strongly agreed). Furthermore, participants reported gaining knowledge of research findings (n = 45; 31.5% agreed, n = 44; 30.8% strongly agreed) and new treatment techniques (n = 48; 33.6% agreed, n = 42; 29.4% strongly agreed). Additionally, 30.1% (n = 43) agreed and 6.3% (n = 9) strongly agreed that these debates influenced their professional development, whereas 46.2% (n = 66) remained neutral.

CONCLUSIONS

Physiotherapy-related debates on the social media platform X positively impacted physiotherapists' perspectives by enhancing critical thinking and knowledge acquisition. Such online debates may serve as valuable tools for professional development in physiotherapy practice.

Using Twitter (X) to Mobilize Knowledge for First Contact Physiotherapists: Qualitative Study

BACKGROUND

Twitter (now X) is a digital social network commonly used by health care professionals. Little is known about whether it helps health care professionals to share, mobilize, and cocreate knowledge or reduce the time between research knowledge being created and used in clinical practice (the evidence-to-practice gap). Musculoskeletal first contact physiotherapists (FCPs) are primary care specialists who diagnose and treat people with musculoskeletal conditions without needing to see their general practitioner (family physician) first. They often work as a sole FCP in practice; hence, they are an ideal health care professional group with whom to explore knowledge mobilization using Twitter.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to explore how Twitter is and can be used to mobilize knowledge, including research findings, to inform FCPs' clinical practice.

METHODS

Semistructured interviews of FCPs with experience of working in English primary care were conducted. FCPs were purposively sampled based on employment arrangements and Twitter use. Recruitment was accomplished via known FCP networks and Twitter, supplemented by snowball sampling. Interviews were conducted digitally and used a topic guide exploring FCP's perceptions and experiences of accessing knowledge, via Twitter, for clinical practice. Data were analyzed thematically and informed by the knowledge mobilization mindlines model. Public contributors were involved throughout.

RESULTS

In total, 19 FCPs consented to the interview (Twitter users, n=14 and female, n=9). Three themes were identified: (1) How Twitter meets the needs of FCPs, (2) Twitter and a journey of knowledge to support clinical practice, and (3) factors impeding knowledge sharing on Twitter. FCPs described needs relating to isolated working practices, time demands, and role uncertainty. Twitter provided rapid access to succinct knowledge, the opportunity to network, and peer reassurance regarding clinical cases, evidence, and policy. FCPs took a journey of knowledge exchange on Twitter, including scrolling for knowledge, filtering for credibility and adapting knowledge for in-service training and clinical practice. Participants engaged best with images and infographics. FCPs described misinformation, bias, echo chambers, unprofessionalism, hostility, privacy concerns and blurred personal boundaries as factors impeding knowledge sharing on Twitter. Consequently, many did not feel confident enough to actively participate on Twitter.

CONCLUSIONS

This study explores how Twitter is and can be used to mobilize knowledge to inform FCP clinical practice. Twitter can meet the knowledge needs of FCPs through rapid access to succinct knowledge, networking opportunities, and professional reassurance. The journey of knowledge exchange from Twitter to clinical practice can be explained by considering the mindlines model, which describes how FCPs exchange knowledge in digital and offline contexts. Findings demonstrate that Twitter can be a useful adjunct to FCP practice, although several factors impede knowledge sharing on the platform. We recommend social media training and enhanced governance guidance from professional bodies to support the use of Twitter for knowledge mobilization.

Surveying the Landscape of Social Media Usage for Health Care by Otolaryngology Patients

OBJECTIVE

To determine factors associated with social media usage for finding a doctor or seeking medical advice among otolaryngology patients.

METHODS

Cross-sectional study of 361 patients visiting our clinics. All participants were asked if they were aware social media may be used to find doctors and if they had ever done so, and also if they were aware social media could be used to get advice about a medical condition or its treatment and if they had ever done so. Demographic characteristics were examined for association with affirmative answers to these questions.

RESULTS

Facebook was the most used social media platform with 50.7% using Facebook daily. Over 50% of participants were aware social media could be used to find a doctor or seek medical advice. Daily use of Facebook was associated with using social media for finding a doctor (OR = 2.57, 95%CI: 1.41-4.67, p = 0.002) and seeking medical advice (OR = 1.72, 95%CI: 1.09-2.71, p = 0.020). Having Medicare was associated with using social media to find a doctor (OR = 2.20, 95%CI: 1.15-4.21, p = 0.017), whereas Medicaid was associated with using social media for medical advice (OR = 1.99, 95%CI: 1.08-3.67, p = 0.027).

CONCLUSION

A majority of otolaryngology patients may be aware of health care applications of social media, with Facebook being the dominant platform, and Medicare insurance identifying patients who may most use social media in this manner. There is also an indication that social determinants of health, as reflected by Medicaid insurance, may be associated with using social media to seek medical advice.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE

NA Laryngoscope, 133:2116-2121, 2023.

Social media use by cardiovascular healthcare professionals in Portugal

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES

Social media (SoMe) has a flourishing role in cardiovascular (CV) medicine as a facilitator of academic communication not only during conferences and congresses, but also by scientific societies and journals. However, there is no solid data illustrating the use of SoMe by CV healthcare professionals (CVHP) in Portugal. Hence, the main goal of this national cross-sectional survey was to accurately characterize SoMe use by Portuguese CVHPs.

METHODS

A 35-item questionnaire was specifically developed for this study, approved by the Digital Health Study Group of the Portuguese Society of Cardiology (SPC), and sent, by e-mail, to the mailing list of the SPC (including 1293 potential recipients).

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

There were 206 valid answers. Fifty-two percent of respondents were female and 58% were younger than 44 years of age with almost two out of three participants being physicians. Ninety-two percent of the survey participants reported that they are currently using SoMe; LinkedIn was the most common platform used for professional purposes. Sixty-four percent believed SoMe had had a positive impact on their clinical practice; 77% and 49% had used SoMe for acquiring and sharing information related to COVID-19, respectively. In conclusion, the majority of Portuguese CVHPs that participated in this survey are actively using SoMe, with a greater participation of those <45 years of age; its clinical impact is positive, with a leading role in the dissemination of evidence during the COVID pandemic.

Why are medical research articles tweeted? The news value perspective

Counts of tweets mentioning research articles are potentially useful as social impact altmetric indicators, especially for health-related topics. One way to help understand what tweet counts indicate is to find factors that associate with the number of tweets received by articles. Using news value theory, this study examined six characteristics of research papers that may cause some articles to be more tweeted than others. For this, we manually coded 300 medical journal articles about COVID-19. A statistical analysis showed that all six factors that make articles more newsworthy according to news value theory (importance, controversy, elite nations, elite persons, scale, news prominence) associated with higher tweet counts. Since these factors are hypothesised to be general human news selection criteria, the results give new evidence that tweet counts may be indicators of general interest to members of society rather than measures of societal impact. This study also provides a new understanding of the strong positive relationship between news mentions and tweet counts for articles. Instead of news coverage attracting tweets or the other way round (journalists noticing highly tweeted articles and writing about them), the results are consistent with newsworthy characteristics of articles attracting both tweets and news mentions.

Understanding researchers’ Twitter uptake, activity and popularity—an analysis of applied research in Germany

Social media is opening up new avenues for disseminating research outputs. While prior literature points to the essential role of Twitter in this context, evidence on what determines variation in researchers´ Twitter engagement remains scarce. In this account-level study of Twitter usage, we consider how research productivity, research quality, and participation in academic conferences relate to Twitter uptake, activity and popularity, while also taking into account differences between academic disciplines. We use a population sample comprising data on Twitter engagement of researchers employed at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe´s largest applied research organization. We find that participation in academic conferences is strongly associated with Twitter uptake and popularity, but not with Twitter activity as such. We also find positive associations between research productivity and Twitter uptake as well as between research quality and popularity. Moreover, physicists use Twitter more than researchers from other disciplines, female researchers use Twitter less, and scientific age is negatively associated with Twitter activity. Our findings contribute to the literature on academic social media usage by providing indications for both push and pull mechanisms at play within social media research dissemination.

Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

This study attempts to analyze patents as cited/mentioned documents to better understand the interest, dissemination and engagement of these documents in social environments, laying the foundations for social media studies of patents (social Patentometrics).Particularly, this study aims to determine how patents are disseminated on Twitter by analyzing three elements: tweets linking to patents, users linking to patents, and patents linked from Twitter. To do this, all the tweets containing at least one link to a full-text patent available on Google Patents were collected and analyzed, yielding a total of 126,815 tweets (and 129,001 links) to 86,417 patents. The results evidence an increase of the number of linking tweets over the years, presumably due to the creation of a standardized patent URL ID and the integration of Google Patents and Google Scholar, which took place in 2015. The engagement achieved by these tweets is limited (80.2% of tweets did not attract likes) but increasing notably since 2018. Two super-publisher twitter bot accounts (dailypatent and uspatentbot) are responsible of 53.3% of all the linking tweets, while most accounts are sporadic users linking to patent as part of a conversation. The patents most tweeted are, by far, from United States (87.5% of all links to Google Patents), mainly due to the effect of the two super-publishers. The impact of patents in terms of the number of tweets linking to them is unrelated to their year of publication, status or number of patent citations received, while controversial and media topics might be more determinant factors. However, further research is needed to better understand the topics discussed around patents on Twitter, the users involved, and the metrics attained. Given the increasing number of linking users and linked patents, this study finds Twitter as a relevant source to measure patent-level metrics, shedding light on the impact and interest of patents by the broad public.

Do Prospective Intent and Established Metrics Correlate with Journal Impact Factor in Musculoskeletal Physical Therapy Trials?: A Secondary Analysis of A Methodological Review

OBJECTIVES

To determine if there are any statistically significant associations between: 1) randomized clinical trials (RCTs) investigating physical therapy musculoskeletal interventions, 2) journal impact factor (JIF), 3) frequency of RCT citation, 4) whether prospective intent was identifiable, and 5) the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) scores.

METHODS

MEDLINE indexed RCTs addressing musculoskeletal interventions published between January 2016 and July 2020 in physical therapy journals were included. Two blinded reviewers identified the RCTs and extracted the variables of interest.

RESULTS

With a familywise alpha adjustment, there was no statistically significant correlation between JIF and number of citations (rho = 0.187; p = 0.0280). Statistically significant weak positive correlations were identified between the JIF and prospectively registered RCTs (rho = 0.240; p = 0.0046), JIF and PEDro scores (rho = 0.250; p = 0.0031), and PEDro scores and prospectively registered RCTs (rho = 0.335; p < 0.0001).

CONCLUSION

The findings of this study suggest that JIF and PEDro scores may not be accurate measures of RCT quality. Failing to ensure that published RCTs followed their prospective intent and using bibliometrics that fail to accurately measure what they propose appears to create untrustworthy preprocessed resources for practicing physical therapists during the evidence-based practice process.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE

1a.

User engagement with scholarly tweets of scientific papers: a large-scale and cross-disciplinary analysis

This study investigates the extent to which scholarly tweets of scientific papers are engaged with by Twitter users through four types of user engagement behaviors, i.e., liking, retweeting, quoting, and replying. Based on a sample consisting of 7 million scholarly tweets of Web of Science papers, our results show that likes is the most prevalent engagement metric, covering 44% of scholarly tweets, followed by retweets (36%), whereas quotes and replies are only present for 9% and 7% of all scholarly tweets, respectively. From a disciplinary point of view, scholarly tweets in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities are more likely to trigger user engagement over other subject fields. The presence of user engagement is more associated with other Twitter-based factors (e.g., number of mentioned users in tweets and number of followers of users) than with science-based factors (e.g., citations and Mendeley readers of tweeted papers). Building on these findings, this study sheds light on the possibility to apply user engagement metrics in measuring deeper levels of Twitter reception of scholarly information.

Disseminating implementation science: Describing the impact of animations shared via social media

Background

Dissemination is an under-researched activity that is important to researchers and funders and may have a role in creating conditions for implementation. We aim to study the impact of two animations shared via social media upon dissemination.

Methods

We developed two short animations to increase the awareness of healthcare positional leaders of work undertaken to enhance a much-used implementation intervention. We measured both how frequently the related articles were accessed, and engagement with the research team, before and after the intervention. We analysed variation over time using statistical process control to identify both trend and periods of significant change.

Results

We found evidence that the animation increased how frequently the articles were accessed, with a significant increase (p = <0.01) during the two weeks after release of each animation. One animation was associated with an increase in positional leaders’ engagement with the research team.

Conclusions

Animations shared via social media can enhance dissemination. We describe lessons from the work to develop the intervention and support calls for work to increase the understanding and adoption of effective dissemination interventions. Our findings provide support for further work using randomised study designs.

Investigating dissemination of scientific information on Twitter: A study of topic networks in opioid publications

While previous research has mostly focused on the “number of mentions” of scientific research on social media, the current study applies “topic networks” to measure public attention to scientific research on Twitter. Topic networks are the networks of co-occurring author keywords in scholarly publications and networks of co-occurring hashtags in the tweets mentioning those publications. We investigate which topics in opioid scholarly publications have received public attention on Twitter. Additionally, we investigate whether the topic networks generated from the publications tweeted by all accounts (bot and nonbot accounts) differ from those generated by nonbot accounts. Our analysis is based on a set of opioid publications from 2011 to 2019 and the tweets associated with them. Results indicated that Twitter users have mostly used generic terms to discuss opioid publications, such as “Pain,” “Addiction,” “Analgesics,” “Abuse,” “Overdose,” and “Disorders.” A considerable amount of tweets is produced by accounts that were identified as automated social media accounts, known as bots. There was a substantial overlap between the topic networks based on the tweets by all accounts (bot and nonbot accounts). This result indicates that it might not be necessary to exclude bot accounts for generating topic networks as they have a negligible impact on the results. This study provided some preliminary evidence that scholarly publications have a network agenda-setting effect on Twitter.

Article promotion on Twitter and Facebook: A case study of Cell journal

Social media has become an increasingly important channel of scholarly communication, especially for promoting the latest research outputs, so its role in facilitating access to academic texts is worth exploring. Based on 324 posts containing scholarly articles shared by journal Cell on Twitter and Facebook, this study compared the user engagement performance of articles posted on both platforms and examined the effect of such social media promotion and user engagement on article visiting. The user engagement performance of the articles was measured by retweets, shares, reactions, and likes, while click data tracked through bitly.com were used to indicate article visits. Statistical analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were applied to explore and understand these data. For Cell, Facebook posts have a more significant influence than similar tweets in terms of volume. The user engagement on Facebook is 2.5~4 times as much as on Twitter. Moreover, the click metric of short links shows that Cell’s posts on Facebook directed twice as many visitors to the papers as posts on Twitter. However, the efficiency of the two platforms is approximate when the difference in the volume of followers is eliminated. The correlation and regression analysis suggested that user engagement positively affects the visiting of Cell’s papers. Both reactions and shares would affect the clicks of the short links to paper text. The results shed light on the implications of sharing scholarly articles on social media platforms for the promotion of article visits.

Credibility of scientific information on social media: Variation by platform, genre and presence of formal credibility cues

Responding to calls to take a more active role in communicating their research findings, scientists are increasingly using open online platforms, such as Twitter, to engage in science communication or to publicize their work. Given the ease with which misinformation spreads on these platforms, it is important for scientists to present their findings in a manner that appears credible. To examine the extent to which the online presentation of science information relates to its perceived credibility, we designed and conducted two surveys on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In the first survey, participants rated the credibility of science information on Twitter compared with the same information in other media, and in the second, participants rated the credibility of tweets with modified characteristics: presence of an image, text sentiment, and the number of likes/retweets. We find that similar information about scientific findings is perceived as less credible when presented on Twitter compared to other platforms, and that perceived credibility increases when presented with recognizable features of a scientific article. On a platform as widely distrusted as Twitter, use of these features may allow researchers who regularly use Twitter for research-related networking and communication to present their findings in the most credible formats.

Content Analysis of Frequency of Information About Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip on Twitter

INTRODUCTION

Early detection and screening of developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) are critical in reducing complications; thus, advocacy and awareness are paramount. Social media, Twitter, in particular, connects users based on their content engagement, allowing global audience to interact with one another, providing an opportunity to spread awareness and support for children and families affected by conditions such as DDH. The objective of this study was to assess the frequency and content of information being published on Twitter pertaining to DDH.

METHODS

A search strategy using key terms was developed. An a priori coding guide using search terms was then created to establish a framework to identify themes regarding DDH on Twitter. Data were extracted over one-week periods in June and July of 2019 and 2020. An excel-based coding guide was developed to organize and analyze the extracted data.

RESULTS

A total of 142 tweets were extracted for analysis; 41 in 2019 and 101 in 2020. The most frequently used search terms were hip dysplasia, developmental dysplasia of the hip, and dislocated hip. In 2019, the most frequent tweet authors were healthcare organizations (13/41, 31.7%) and healthcare professionals (12/41, 29.3%). In contrast in 2020, 32.7% (33/101) tweets were authored by patients. Prevention, treatment, and general discussions were top categories in 2019, compared to education, awareness, and general discussions in 2020.

CONCLUSION

Our data indicate that user engagement with DDH content on Twitter increased by 2.5-fold from 2019 to 2020. We found similar patterns regarding the types of authors and content type in both years. However, focus shifted toward topics of education and awareness in 2020.

SIGNIFICANCE

Our analysis identified trends and gaps in the use of Twitter that could be implemented by users to optimize messages, such as connecting directly and conversing with users through replies. Findings also indicate the importance of multi-author engagement to increase the breadth of distribution of information. Social media platforms can efficiently disseminate information to a wide range of individuals; however, they must be leveraged appropriately to accurately inform the public about DDH. Engaging with Twitter users hold great potential to promote advocacy and increase early detection and screening for DDH.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE

3.

Twitter data analysis to assess the interest of citizens on the impact of marine plastic pollution

Few studies have mined social media platforms to assess environmental concerns. In this study, Twitter was scraped to obtain a ~140,000 tweet dataset related specifically to marine plastic pollution. The goal is to understand what kind of users profiles are tweeting and how and when they do it. In addition, topic modelling and graph theory techniques have allowed us to identify main concerns on this topic: i) impact on wildlife, ii) microplastics/water pollution, iii) estimates/reports, iv) legislation/protection, and v) recycling/cleaning initiatives. Results reveal a scarce influence of organizations involved in research and marine environmental awareness, so some guidelines are depicted that could help to adjust their communication plans. This is relevant to engage society through reliable information, change habits and reinforce sustainable behaviour. A visualization tool has been created to analyze the results over time.

Reach and Power of Physician-Initiated Tweets in a Twitter Inflammatory Bowel Disease Community

Background

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) specialist Twitter engagement and thematic content was assessed.

Methods

The nature of interaction between IBD specialists and users who responded to them was analyzed based on (1) content analysis of stakeholders who responded to them; (2) nature of interaction through a manual thematic content analysis of IBD specialist tweets and responses; (3) prominence of interaction by employing descriptive analysis and statistical inferences relative to the number of replies, likes, and retweets. Analyzed samples included of tweets (n = 320) compiled from 16 IBD specialists, and associated replies (n = 299), retweets (n = 869), and likes (n = 4068).

Results

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) more often engaged with peer-HCPs, compared to other stakeholders. When it comes to the nature of exchanges, of original tweets, the most common content was for knowledge sharing (58%) and endorsement (28%). In the knowledge sharing category, research accounted for more than half of those tweets (53%). Of replies, knowledge sharing occurred most frequently with a subtheme of IBD management (62%).

Conclusions

HCP-HCP Twitter engagement was more frequent than HCP-other Twitter stakeholder interaction. The primary purpose for this engagement was found to obtain real-time information, professionally network, and disseminate research.

Twitter as a Tool to Spread Communication Regarding Genitourinary Cancers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

OBJECTIVES:

To better characterize the relay of information about prostate, kidney, and bladder cancer on Twitter in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

Tweets containing the joint hashtags “#COVID-19” and either “#bladder cancer”, “#kidney cancer”, or “#prostate cancer” were identified on the Twitter platform from January 1, 2020 to July 30, 2020. The Twitter handle responsible for each tweet was categorized as an Academic, Medical Education, Patient Advocacy Groups/Non-Profits, Pharmaceutical, or Other entity based on content domain. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize data on Twitter handle characteristics stratified by disease category (bladder, kidney, and prostate). Median/interquartile range and percentages were used to summarize continuous and categorical data, respectively. Number of tweets containing the relevant joint hashtags were tracked over time in relation to the cumulative United States case count of COVID-19.

RESULTS:

The content of 730 total tweets containing the joint hashtags “COVID-19” and either “#bladder cancer” (138 tweets), “#kidney cancer” (137 tweets), or “#prostate cancer” (455 tweets) from January 1, 2020 to July 31, 2020 were analyzed. We identified 326 unique Twitter handles across all disease states (62 bladder, 47 kidney, and 217 prostate-related). Academic Twitter handles accounted for the greatest number of tweets containing the joint hashtags (31%). Temporal tracking of tweets with regard to monthly U.S. COVID cases revealed that communication surged in March of 2020 and peaked in April for both bladder and kidney cancer, whereas related prostate cancer Twitter communication peaked in May of 2020.

CONCLUSIONS:

As COVID-19 case counts rose in the United States initially, so too did communication surrounding COVID-19 and genitourinary cancers on Twitter. Many of these conversations were driven by academically-associated Twitter accounts.

The #PalliativeCare Conversation on Twitter: An Analysis of Trends, Content, and Caregiver Perspectives

CONTEXT

Palliative care is known to improve patients' quality of life, but oftentimes these conversations occur outside of the health-care setting.

OBJECTIVES

To characterize the #PalliativeCare Twitter network and evaluate the caregiver experience within palliative care.

METHODS

In this cross-sectional study, a total of 182,661 #PalliativeCare tweets by 26,837 users from June 1, 2015 to June 1, 2019 were analyzed using Symplur Signals. Analysis included activity metrics, content analysis, user characteristics, engagement, and network analysis. Similar metrics were performed on tweets by self-identified caregivers (482), who wrote a total of 3952 tweets. Qualitative analysis was completed on a systematic sample of caregiver tweets.

RESULTS

The number of #PalliativeCare tweets, users, and impressions has increased by an annual average of 18.7%, 16.4%, and 32.5%, respectively. Support, access, and patients were among the Trending Terms. About 39.4% of Trending Articles were scientifically valid, and information about palliative care and comorbidities had the greatest number of articles. The majority of users wrote five or less #PalliativeCare tweets. Network analysis revealed central hubs to be palliative care advocacy organizations and physicians. The five main themes from qualitative analysis of caregiver tweets were 1) advocacy and events, 2) care strategies, 3) resources, 4) public health issues, and 5) myths related to palliative care.

CONCLUSION

The use of Twitter as a platform for palliative care conversations is growing rapidly. Twitter serves as a platform to facilitate #PalliativeCare conversation among patients, caregivers, physicians, and other healthcare providers.

A call for governments to pause Twitter censorship: using Twitter data as social-spatial sensors of COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 research diffusion

In this study we determined whether Twitter data can be used as social-spatial sensors to show how research on COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 diffuses through the population to reach the people that are affected by the disease. We performed a cross-sectional bibliometric analysis between 23rd March and 14th April 2020. Three sources of data were used: (1) deaths per number of population for COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 retrieved from John Hopkins University and Worldometer, (2) publications related to COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 retrieved from World Health Organisation COVID-19 database, and (3) tweets of these publications retrieved from Altmetric.com and Twitter. In the analysis, the number of publications used was 1761, and number of tweets used was 751,068. Mapping of worldwide data illustrated that high Twitter activity was related to high numbers of COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 deaths, with tweets inversely weighted with number of publications. Regression models of worldwide data showed a positive correlation between the national deaths per number of population and tweets when holding number of publications constant (coefficient 0.0285, S.E. 0.0003, p < 0.001). Twitter can play a crucial role in the rapid research response during the COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, especially to spread research with prompt public scrutiny. Governments are urged to pause censorship of social media platforms to support the scientific community’s fight against COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2.

Social Media for Scholarly Communication in Central Asia and Its Neighbouring Countries

The current digital era has led to a surge in the use of Social Media in academia. Worldwide connectivity has brought to the fore a scarce participation of Central Asia and adjoining regions in scientific discussions. Global perspectives in science may not be recorded due to such communication disparities. An equal representation of all ethnic groups is essential to have a rounded picture of the topic at hand. The extent of use of social media platforms in various regions is determined by social, economic, religious, political, cultural and ethnic factors, which may limit participation. The paper aims to examine the use of social media by academicians in the Central Asian countries, China and Mongolia. It also focusses on the linguistic skills of the Central Asian, Chinese and Mongolian population and their eagerness to be involved in global discussions. Understanding the factors limiting participation from specific regions is the first step in this direction.

Parents’ Views on Family Resiliency in Sustainable Remote Schooling during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Finland

The closure of schools because of the COVID-19 pandemic created a challenge for families and teachers in supporting children’s remote schooling. This study investigates parents’ perspectives on their accommodation to the rapid change to remote schooling from the point of view of sustainable education. The study was conducted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 via an online questionnaire for parents, to which 316 voluntary participants responded. Data were analyzed using a theory-driven content analysis. According to the results, parents were worried about the learning and wellbeing of their children as well as management of daily life and use of information and communications technology (ICT). The results show the importance of schools and teachers as well as networks in supporting family resilience during rapid changes. Families’ individual needs should be acknowledged and met in a sustainable way to support children’s learning in changing settings, including remote schooling.

Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user's followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.

Fostering Social Project Impact with Twitter: Current Usage and Perspectives

Social impact assessment has become a major concern within the research community. While different methodological advancements have been made to better display, as well as to measure, achieved impacts, social media has proved to be a potential domain to generate many new opportunities to support both the communication as well as the realization of social impact. Within this context, the current research presents an analysis of how Twitter is used among a subset of research projects to maximize social impact. The research focuses on the use of Twitter, as one of the most often used social media, by the members of scientific projects funded under one part of the FP7 funding framework of the European Union called Science in Society. The data were analyzed using NVivo, and WordStat Provalis software. The results presented in this study include exploratory data analysis, topic mining and the analysis of the impact of projects on Twitter. The results indicate moderate use of Twitter among the observed projects, but with a strong focus on the dissemination of project results, thus indicating a trend towards the usage of social media for communicating the social impact of research projects.

Feeling Positive About Reopening? New Normal Scenarios From COVID-19 US Reopen Sentiment Analytics

The Coronavirus pandemic has created complex challenges and adverse circumstances. This research identifies public sentiment amidst problematic socioeconomic consequences of the lockdown, and explores ensuing four potential public sentiment associated scenarios. The severity and brutality of COVID-19 have led to the development of extreme feelings, and emotional and mental healthcare challenges. This research focuses on emotional consequences - the presence of extreme fear, confusion and volatile sentiments, mixed along with trust and anticipation. It is necessary to gauge dominant public sentiment trends for effective decisions and policies. This study analyzes public sentiment using Twitter Data, time-aligned to the COVID-19 reopening debate, to identify dominant sentiment trends associated with the push to reopen the economy. Present research uses textual analytics methodologies to analyze public sentiment support for two potential divergent scenarios - an early opening and a delayed opening, and consequences of each. Present research concludes on the basis of textual data analytics, including textual data visualization and statistical validation, that tweets data from American Twitter users shows more positive sentiment support, than negative, for reopening the US economy. This research develops a novel sentiment polarity based public sentiment scenarios (PSS) framework, which will remain useful for future crises analysis, well beyond COVID-19. With additional validation, this research stream could present valuable time sensitive opportunities for state governments, the federal government, corporations and societal leaders to guide local and regional communities, and the nation into a successful new normal future.

COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts

The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical, and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals, and the public may need to identify important new studies quickly. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during March 21, 2020 to April 18, 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited 3 weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health-focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance.

Social Media Coverage of Scientific Articles Immediately After Publication Predicts Subsequent Citations - #SoME_Impact Score: Observational Analysis

BACKGROUND

Social media coverage is increasingly used to spread the message of scientific publications. Traditionally, the scientific impact of an article is measured by the number of citations. At a journal level, this conventionally matures over a 2-year period, and it is challenging to gauge impact around the time of publication.

OBJECTIVE

We, therefore, aimed to assess whether Web-based attention is associated with citations and to develop a predictive model that assigns relative importance to different elements of social media coverage: the #SoME_Impact score.

METHODS

We included all original articles published in 2015 in a selection of the highest impact journals: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, Cell, and Science. We first characterized the change in Altmetric score over time by taking a single month's sample of recently published articles from the same journals and gathered Altmetric data daily from the time of publication to create a mixed effects spline model. We then obtained the overall weighted Altmetric score for all articles from 2015, the unweighted data for each Altmetric component, and the 2-year citation count from Scopus for each of these articles from 2016 to 2017. We created a stepwise multivariable linear regression model to develop a #SoME_Score that was predictive of 2-year citations. The score was validated using a dataset of articles from the same journals published in 2016.

RESULTS

In our unselected sample of 145 recently published articles, social media coverage appeared to plateau approximately 14 days after publication. A total of 3150 articles with a median citation count of 16 (IQR 5-33) and Altmetric score of 72 (IQR 28-169) were included for analysis. On multivariable regression, compared with articles in the lowest quantile of #SoME_Score, articles in the second, third, and upper quantiles had 0.81, 15.20, and 87.67 more citations, respectively. On the validation dataset, #SoME_Score model outperformed the Altmetric score (adjusted R2 0.19 vs 0.09; P<.001). Articles in the upper quantile of #SoME_Score were more than 5 times more likely to be among the upper quantile of those cites (odds ratio 5.61, 95% CI 4.70-6.73).

CONCLUSIONS

Social media attention predicts citations and could be used as an early surrogate measure of scientific impact. Owing to the cross-sectional study design, we cannot determine whether correlation relates to causation.

Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work

To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience. The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research. In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter. We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates. We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.

Librarian integration into health care conferences: a case report

Background

Health care continuing education conferences are important educational events that present opportunities for structured learning, interactive sharing, and professional networking. Conference presenters frequently cite published literature, such as clinical trials, to supply an evidence-based foundation, with presenters’ slides often shared with conference attendees. By using social media, these conferences can have greater impact, assist in supporting evidence-based clinical practice, and increase stakeholder engagement.

Case Presentation

The authors present a case of embedding a health sciences librarian into the Annual Johns Hopkins Critical Care Rehabilitation Conference. The librarian served multiple roles, including social media ambassador, conference exhibitor, and presenter. We explore how these roles contributed to the field of early rehabilitation research through information dissemination and education. We also address best practices for librarian support of the conference, with a discussion of tools, platforms, and work flows that were beneficial.

Conclusions

Librarian integration facilitated education about bibliographic literature database content, database searching, critical appraisal, and reporting of search methodology. Additionally, the librarian contributed to real-time distribution of scholarly literature through proficiency with web platforms, citation management programs, and social media. Librarians’ expertise in information organization and dissemination, as well as various technology platforms, make them a valuable addition to health care conferences.

Twitter metrics complement traditional conference evaluations to evaluate knowledge translation at a National Emergency Medicine Conference

OBJECTIVES

Conferences are designed for knowledge translation, but traditional conference evaluations are inadequate. We lack studies that explore alternative metrics to traditional evaluation metrics. We sought to determine how traditional evaluation metrics and Twitter metrics performed using data from a conference of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP).

METHODS

This study used a retrospective design to compare social media posts and tradition evaluations related to an annual specialty conference. A post ("tweet") on the social media platform Twitter was included if it associated with a session. We differentiated original and discussion tweets from retweets. We weighted the numbers of tweets and retweets to comprise a novel Twitter Discussion Index. We extracted the speaker score from the conference evaluation. We performed descriptive statistics and correlation analyses.

RESULTS

Of a total of 3,804 tweets, 2,218 (58.3%) were session-specific. Forty-eight percent (48%) of all sessions received tweets (mean = 11.7 tweets; 95% CI of 0 to 57.5; range, 0-401), with a median Twitter Discussion Index score of 8 (interquartile range, 0 to 27). In the 111 standard presentations, 85 had traditional evaluation metrics and 71 received tweets (p > 0.05), while 57 received both. Twenty (20 of 71; 28%) moderated posters and 44% (40 of 92) posters or oral abstracts received tweets without traditional evaluation metrics. We found no significant correlation between Twitter Discussion Index and traditional evaluation metrics (R = 0.087).

CONCLUSIONS

We found no correlation between traditional evaluation metrics and Twitter metrics. However, in many sessions with and without traditional evaluation metrics, audience created real-time tweets to disseminate knowledge. Future conference organizers could use Twitter metrics as a complement to traditional evaluation metrics to evaluate knowledge translation and dissemination.

Health care professionals’ knowledge of commonly used sedative, analgesic and neuromuscular drugs: A single center (Rambam Health Care Campus), prospective, observational survey

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusion

Social media for research, education and practice in rheumatology

Online social networking offers numerous opportunities for continuing medical education, professional development, and scholarly collaboration. Available social media channels proved useful for expanding education and research perspectives, particularly in rapidly developing academic disciplines such as rheumatology. Although there are numerous advantages of social media, busy clinicians should be aware of some drawbacks related to misinformation, unethical promotion, and unprofessional behavior in globally expanding platforms. Filtering credible and expert-proven information by skilled users is, therefore, increasingly important. Enforcing ethical norms and advancing professional etiquette in the field is strongly advisable. This article overviews the advantages and shortcomings of social media and reflects on available platforms for education and research in rheumatology.

Do articles in open access journals have more frequent altmetric activity than articles in subscription-based journals? An investigation of the research output of Finnish universities

Scientific articles available in Open Access (OA) have been found to attract more citations and online attention to the extent that it has become common to speak about OA Altmetrics Advantage. This research investigates how the OA Altmetrics Advantage holds for a specific case of research articles, namely the research outputs from universities in Finland. Furthermore, this research examines disciplinary and platform specific differences in that (dis)advantage. The new methodological approaches developed in this research focus on relative visibility, i.e. how often articles in OA journals receive at least one mention on the investigated online platforms, and relative receptivity, i.e. how frequently articles in OA journals gain mentions in comparison to articles in subscription-based journals. The results show significant disciplinary and platform specific differences in the OA advantage, with articles in OA journals within for instance veterinary sciences, social and economic geography and psychology receiving more citations and attention on social media platforms, while the opposite was found for articles in OA journals within medicine and health sciences. The results strongly support field- and platform-specific considerations when assessing the influence of journal OA status on altmetrics. The new methodological approaches used in this research will serve future comparative research into OA advantage of scientific articles over time and between countries.