Future work is needed to help create standardized reporting guidelines to improve the reproducibility and comparability of Twitter studies. Twitter-based public health research is a growing field. Most studies were published in the past 2 years, and were supported by a wide variety of funders. We found that the majority of articles (57%) focused on analyzing the content of tweets, whereas other studies harnessed Twitter’s interactive features for recruitment or interventions. In this review, we analyzed 137 studies that used Twitter to conduct health research that collectively analyzed more than 5 billion tweets. This growing body of work, however, has not yet been systematically studied. Public health researchers have begun to use Twitter for research-both to interact with study participants and to mine the platform for data. Twitter is an interactive social media platform established in 2006 that allows users to send 140-character messages to one another. Future work should develop standardized reporting guidelines for health researchers who use Twitter and policies that address privacy and ethical concerns in social media research. Twitter-based health research is a growing field funded by a diversity of organizations. Many data elements discernible from a user’s Twitter profile, especially demographics, have been underreported in the literature and can provide new opportunities to characterize the users whose data are analyzed in these studies. We identified a new taxonomy to describe Twitter use in health research with 6 categories. Primary funding sources included federal (63%), university (13%), and foundation (6%).Ĭonclusions. Approximately one third of the studies mentioned ethical board approval in their articles. ![]() Public health (23% n = 31) and infectious disease (20% n = 28) were the research fields most commonly represented in the included studies. Most studies were published recently (33% in 2015). The Twitter-based studies in this review focused on a small subset of data elements including content analysis, geotags, and language. Of 38 potential data features describing tweets and Twitter users, 23 were reported in fewer than 4% of the articles. These studies collectively analyzed more than 5 billion tweets primarily by using the Twitter application program interface. The primary approaches for using Twitter in health research that constitute a new taxonomy were content analysis (56% n = 77), surveillance (26% n = 36), engagement (14% n = 19), recruitment (7% n = 9), intervention (7% n = 9), and network analysis (4% n = 5). Of 1110 unique health-related articles mentioning Twitter, 137 met eligibility criteria. Two authors independently screened studies and abstracted data related to the approach to analysis of Twitter data, methodology used to study Twitter, and current state of Twitter research by evaluating time of publication, research topic, discussion of ethical concerns, and study funding source. We searched for peer-reviewed original research studies that primarily used Twitter for health research.ĭata collection and analysis. We performed a literature search in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and CINAHL through September 2015. ![]() To systematically review the use of Twitter in health research, define a taxonomy to describe Twitter use, and characterize the current state of Twitter in health research. ![]() Less is known about the use of social media data sources, such as Twitter, for this purpose. Researchers have used traditional databases to study public health for decades.
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