Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e40253. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040253. Epub 2012 Jul 5.
In recent years, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) has increased its efforts to use its annual conference to inform and educate the public about kidney disease. Social media, including Twitter, has been one method used by the Society to accomplish this goal. Twitter is a popular microblogging service that serves as a potent tool for disseminating information. It allows for short messages (140 characters) to be composed by any author and distributes those messages globally and quickly. The dissemination of information is necessary if Twitter is to be considered a tool that can increase public awareness of kidney disease. We hypothesized that content, citation, and sentiment analyses of tweets generated from Kidney Week 2011 would reveal a large number of educational tweets that were disseminated to the public. An ideal tweet for accomplishing this goal would include three key features: 1) informative content, 2) internal citations, and 3) positive sentiment score. Informative content was found in 29% of messages, greater than that found in a similarly sized medical conference (2011 ADA Conference, 16%). Informative tweets were more likely to be internally, rather than externally, cited (38% versus 22%, p<0.0001), thereby amplifying the original information to an even larger audience. Informative tweets had more negative sentiment scores than uninformative tweets (means -0.162 versus 0.199 respectively, p<0.0001), therefore amplifying a tweet whose content had a negative tone. Our investigation highlights significant areas of promise and improvement in using Twitter to disseminate medical information in nephrology from a scientific conference. This goal is pertinent to many nephrology-focused conferences that wish to increase public awareness of kidney disease.
近年来，美国肾脏病学会（ASN）加大了努力，利用其年度会议向公众宣传和教育有关肾脏疾病的知识。社交媒体，包括 Twitter，是学会实现这一目标的一种方法。Twitter 是一种流行的微博服务，是一种传播信息的有力工具。它允许任何作者撰写不超过 140 个字符的短消息，并在全球范围内快速分发这些消息。如果要将 Twitter 视为一种可以提高公众对肾脏疾病认识的工具，那么信息的传播是必要的。我们假设对 2011 年肾脏周期间生成的推文进行内容、引用和情感分析，将揭示出大量向公众传播的教育性推文。实现这一目标的理想推文应包含三个关键特征：1）有信息含量，2）内部引用，3）积极的情绪评分。有 29%的消息具有信息含量，高于类似规模的医学会议（2011 年 ADA 会议，16%）。有信息含量的推文更有可能是内部引用，而不是外部引用（38%比 22%，p<0.0001），从而将原始信息放大到更大的受众。有信息含量的推文的情绪评分比无信息含量的推文更负面（平均值分别为-0.162 和 0.199，p<0.0001），因此放大了内容带有负面基调的推文。我们的调查突出了在使用 Twitter 从科学会议传播医学信息方面具有很大的潜力和改进空间。这一目标与许多希望提高公众对肾脏疾病认识的肾脏病学重点会议相关。
