Purpose
The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which started in late December 2019, has spread to more than 200 countries. As no vaccine is yet available for this pandemic, government and health agencies are taking draconian steps to contain it. This pandemic is also trending on social media, particularly on Twitter. The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the general public reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducts a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets through VOSviewer to examine people’s reactions related to the COVID-19 outbreak in the world. Moreover, sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques are used to find frequent words/patterns and their relationship in tweets.
Findings
Seven clusters (themes) were found through VOSviewer: Cluster 1 (green): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the USA. Cluster 2 (red): public sentiments about COVID-19 in Italy and Iran and a vaccine, Cluster 3 (purple): public sentiments about doomsday and science credibility. Cluster 4 (blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in India. Cluster 5 (yellow): public sentiments about COVID-19’s emergence. Cluster 6 (light blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the Philippines. Cluster 7 (orange): Public sentiments about COVID-19 US Intelligence Report. The most frequent words/patterns discovered with SPM were “COVID-19,” “Coronavirus,” “Chinese virus” and the most frequent and high confidence sequential rules were related to “Coronavirus, testing, lockdown, China and Wuhan.”
Research limitations/implications
The methodology can be used to analyze the opinions/thoughts of the general public on Twitter and to categorize them accordingly. Moreover, the categories (generated by VOSviewer) can be correlated with the results obtained with pattern mining techniques.
Social implications
This study has a significant socio-economic impact as Twitter offers content posting and sharing to billions of users worldwide.
Originality/value
According to the authors’ best knowledge, this may be the first study to carry out a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets at a glance and mining the tweets with SPM to investigate how people reacted to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter.
The purpose of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis to examine the most influential journals, institutions, and countries in social media (SM) publications related to knowledge management (KM). Moreover, various research themes in SM KM publications are also explored. VOSviewer was employed to process 234 SM KM publications retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) in the time period 2009-2019. Different methodologies were used according to the nature of bibliometric analysis and explained in each section. Journal of Knowledge Management was the most influential journal in SM KM publications. USA and England ranked first and second respectively, while the Tampere University of Technology was the most productive institute in SM KM research. Four emerged themes indicated an explicit contribution of SM users in KM through big data, knowledge sharing, innovation, Enterprise 2.0, and social capital. This is the first bibliometric study that explores the overall contribution of SM publications in the KM field.
In literature, there is a shortage of comprehensive documents that can provide proper details about Twitter in research community. This study conducted a first descriptive bibliometric analysis to examine the most influential journals, institutions, and countries on Twitter. Similarly, bibliometric mapping analysis is carried out to explore different research themes in Twitter publications. VOSviewer was employed to process the 11,006 Twitter publications retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) from 2009 to 2018. Obtained results suggest that USA and China received the highest number of publications on Twitter research, while the University of Illinois was the most productive institute. Furthermore, the five major themes have emerged in Twitter publications, and its remarkable role has been found in event detection, sentiment analysis, education, health, politics, and crisis as well as risk management. The authors believe that this study will open new doors for researchers to use online Twitter social networking communities in beauty salons, consulting companies, banks, and airlines.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.