Enhancing medical students' science communication skills: from the perspective of new media

With the development of science over the years, people have increasingly realized the importance of science communication. Unfortunately, very little research has focused on helping medical students develop the capabilities of science communication. To improve medical students' science communication and evaluate the effectiveness of New Media through mobile clients in health science communication, a competition was held among medical undergraduates. Outstanding works were selected for publication on our official health science communication WeChat account. Furthermore, the participants volunteered to complete a questionnaire survey to help us assess students' awareness of science communication. Our analysis revealed that students had a strong willingness to serve society and to participate in science communication work. Students generally agreed that science communication work had excellent effects on professional knowledge and related skills. In addition, the correlation results showed that the greater students' willingness to participate in health science communication was, the greater their sense of gain. New Media effectively expand the influence of students' popular science works. Our findings suggest that competition in science communication has a positive impact on enhancing students' awareness and capabilities in science communication. In addition, New Media are an effective way to improve students' scientific communication efficiency. However, we also noted that students' participation rate and enthusiasm for scientific communication were not high. Further research is needed to determine the reasons for this situation and potential strategies to further improve students' science communication.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The science communication competition had a positive impact on helping medical students develop awareness and capabilities for science communication. In addition, New Media are an effective way to improve students' scientific communication efficiency.

What Drives the Influence of Health Science Communication Accounts on TikTok? A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Medical institutions face a variety of challenges as they seek to enhance their reputation and increase the influence of their social media accounts. Becoming a social media influencer in the health field in today's complex online environment requires integrated social and technical systems. However, rather than holistically investigating the mechanism of account influence, studies have focused on a narrow subset of social and technical conditions that drive online influence. We attribute this to the mismatch between complex causality problems and traditional symmetric regression methods. In this study, we adopted an asymmetric configurational perspective that allowed us to test a causally complex model of the conditions that create strong and not-strong account influence. We used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to detect the effects of varying configurations of three social system characteristics (i.e., an oncology-related attribute, a public attribute, and comment interaction) and two technical system characteristics (i.e., telepresence and video collection) on the TikTok accounts of 63 elderly Chinese doctors (60 to 92 years old). Our results revealed two pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to strong account influence and three pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to not-strong account influence. Furthermore, the results confirmed that a single antecedent condition cannot, on its own, produce an outcome, i.e., account influence. Multiple inter-related conditions are required to produce an influential account. These results offer a more holistic picture of how health science communication accounts operate and reconcile the scattered results in the literature. We also demonstrate how configurational theory and methods can be used to analyze the complexities of social media platforms.

"My People Already Know That": The Imagined Audience and COVID-19 Health Information Sharing Practices on Social Media

This article examines how imagined audiences and impression management strategies shape COVID-19 health information sharing practices on social media and considers the implications of this for combatting the spread of misinformation online. In an interview study with 27 Canadian adults, participants were shown two infographics about masks and vaccines produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and asked whether or not they would share these on social media. We find that interviewees' willingness to share the WHO infographics is negotiated against their mental perception of the online audience, which is conceptualized in three distinct ways. First, interviewees who would not share the infographics frequently describe a self-similar audience of peers that are "in the know" about COVID-19; second, those who might share the infographics conjure a specific and contextual audience who "needs" the information; and finally, those who said they would share the infographics most frequently conjure an abstract audience of "the public" or "my community" to explain that decision. Implications of these sharing behaviors for combatting the spread of misinformation are discussed.