How Twitter Is Studied in the Medical Professions: A Classification of Twitter Papers Indexed in PubMed

Abstract

BackgroundSince their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research.ObjectiveThis paper aims to identify published work relating to Twitter within the fields indexed by PubMed, and then to classify it. This classification will provide a framework in which future researchers will be able to position their work, and to provide an understanding of the current reach of research using Twitter in medical disciplines.MethodsPapers on Twitter and related topics were identified and reviewed. The papers were then qualitatively classified based on the paper’s title and abstract to determine their focus. The work that was Twitter focused was studied in detail to determine what data, if any, it was based on, and from this a categorization of the data set size used in the studies was developed. Using open coded content analysis additional important categories were also identified, relating to the primary methodology, domain, and aspect.ResultsAs of 2012, PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations from biomedical literature, and from these a corpus of 134 potentially Twitter related papers were identified, eleven of which were subsequently found not to be relevant. There were no papers prior to 2009 relating to microblogging, a term first used in 2006. Of the remaining 123 papers which mentioned Twitter, thirty were focused on Twitter (the others referring to it tangentially). The early Twitter focused papers introduced the topic and highlighted the potential, not carrying out any form of data analysis. The majority of published papers used analytic techniques to sort through thousands, if not millions, of individual tweets, often depending on automated tools to do so. Our analysis demonstrates that researchers are starting to use knowledge discovery methods and data mining techniques to understand vast quantities of tweets: the study of Twitter is becoming quantitative research.ConclusionsThis work is to the best of our knowledge the first overview study of medical related research based on Twitter and related microblogging. We have used 5 dimensions to categorize published medical related research on Twitter. This classification provides a framework within which researchers studying development and use of Twitter within medical related research, and those undertaking comparative studies of research, relating to Twitter in the area of medicine and beyond, can position and ground their work.

What do we get from Twitter—and What Not? A Close Look at Twitter Research in the Social Sciences

“…word clustering, event detection, sentiment analysis, and manual content analysis of tweets). Table 2 lists the methods applied in the 25 publications on two levels: The classification applied by Williams et al (2013b) was used to classify papers as being either 1) analytic (quantitative or qualitative analysis of data, sometimes supported by methods from artificial intelligence, mathematics or statistics); 2) design and development (building or proposing systems or demonstrators); or, 3) examination (review or survey type works including case studies and ethnographic studies). As this is still a rather general level of research methods, open coded analysis on the publications' full texts was used to specify the applied methods.…”

“…By now, a meta-discussion on comparability of approaches (Bruns 2013;Giglietto et al 2012;Karpf 2012;Williams et al 2013a) and on research ethics (Boyd and Crawford 2012 Puschmann and Burgess 2014; Zimmer and Proferes 2014; Zimmer and Proferes in press) has begun, and shared metrics especially for Twitter data analysis (Bruns and Stiegliz 2012) have been proposed. Both Williams et al (2013a and2013b) and Zimmer and Proferes (in press) have conducted a comprehensive analysis of published works in order to describe the current state of research. Williams, Terrace and Warwick (2013a) identified a broad set of more than 1,100 publications on Twitter research and included publications from different fields and retrieved via different sources in order to provide a very comprehensive and general overview on the development of Twitter research.…”

“…They particularly focus on the role of ethical considerations in these publications. Williams et al (2013b) then look at a Twitter studies in the particular disciplines of medical professions. There is, however, still relatively little knowledge about the distribution of Twitter research and the applied approaches in other disciplines, and in the social sciences in particular.…”

Archiving information from geotagged tweets to promote reproducibility and comparability in social media research

“…Some researchers consequently are referring to Twitter as the 'model organism' of social media research -and Tufekci (2014) has outlined the problematic consequences this has for the field. Williams et al (2013aWilliams et al ( , 2013b as well as Zimmer and Proferes (2014a) have conducted meta-analyses of Twitter studies that illustrate their diversity, for example, when it comes to approaches used for data collection, sample sizes or research ethics. There are, however, only a small number of publications that use preexisting datasets (Zimmer and Proferes, 2014a).…”

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“…Textanalytics is able to extract Cloud‐based information on gender and age group. While the ethical/legal issues of using Twitter in medical research have not been thoroughly discussed in academia, a guideline was recently recommended by the Virginia Tech Institute, which includes, but is not limited to, avoiding the exposure of user identity and making the study aims publicly available.…”