The Democratization of Scientific Conferences: Twitter in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

Purpose of Review The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had profound impacts upon scientific discourse in our field, most prominently through the abrupt transition of malignant hematology conferences to all-digital formats. These virtual components will likely be incorporated into future iterations of these conferences even as in-person attendance is reincorporated. In this review, we discuss ways in which usage of the social networking platform Twitter has expanded in the past year during virtual conferences as a method to facilitate-and, in some ways, democratize-information flow and professional networking. Recent Findings Emerging Twitter-based tools in malignant hematology include presenter-developed #tweetorials, conferencespecific "poster walks," and disease-specific online journal clubs. Twitter is also increasingly being used for networking across institutional and international lines, allowing for conversations to continue year-round as a first step toward multicenter collaborations as well as in-person #tweetups at subsequent meetings. Summary The ability of Twitter to enable uninterrupted information exchange has reinforced its central role in medical and scientific communication in a way that will certainly outlive the COVID-19 pandemic.

SciTweets -- A Dataset and Annotation Framework for Detecting Scientific Online Discourse

“…We measured the inter-annotator agreement by computing Fleiss Kappa 𝜅 [9] with the labels of all four annotators to evaluate the annotation quality. Agreement scores of 0.61, 0.63 and 0.66 for categories 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 averaging a score of 0.63 are comparable to results on similar tasks 3 . Since we estimate our task to be more difficult than those tasks and because the fleiss score has been shown to be different based on the number of annotators [9], we estimate our results to be comparable to the mentioned papers and thus to be encouraging.…”

“…This has led to research into scientific online discourse across various disciplines. From a social sciences perspective, works measure the engagement with scientific publications on social media [5,6,12] or investigate the role of social media in facilitating the flow of scientific information [3]. In science communication, research discusses implications of risk communication [16] or the spreading pattern associated with preliminary scientific results and the diffusion of science through social networks [17,30], while research in cognitive and social psychology investigates the perceived trustworthiness of scientific online discourse [15].…”

“…Experimenting with different base models showed that SciB-ERT[4] provides superior performance on the tasks. To evaluate3 Thorne et al[26] achieved a fleiss score of 0.68 on a fact verification task with five annotators and Alam et al[1] achieved a score of 0.75 on a task of determining whether a tweet contains a verifiable factual claim.…”

Hematology on Twitter

“…Numerous papers and articles have explored the actual and potential value of social media for both physicians and patients [8]. Not only does it help to disseminate upto-date information among people in the healthcare system, but also brings opportunities for professional development [3,5,9,10]. Nowadays, news on social media spreads more rapidly than in traditional newspapers or radio or television broadcast [8].…”

Elevating Twitter-Based Journal Club Discussions by Leveraging a Voice-Based Platform: #HemepathJC Meets Clubhouse

“…Social media-based platforms such as Twitter offer an easy-to-use, free, and easily accessible global communication tool that can be leveraged for uninterrupted information exchange in the medical world. Devoid of traditional barriers to knowledge-sharing, Twitter allows for free, live, 24/7/365 real-time learning [ 1 , 2 ]. In malignant hematology/hematopathology discourse, tweetorials, conference-related tweets, #SoMe based multi-institutional collaborations, and online journal clubs have, until recently, been considered the new kids on the block [ 3 , 4 ].…”