Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA, United States.
Digital CoLab, Innovation Technology, University of California, Davis Health, Sacramento, CA, United States.
J Med Internet Res. 2022 Sep 6;24(9):e37752. doi: 10.2196/37752.
Physicians are increasingly using Twitter as a channel for communicating with colleagues and the public. Identifying physicians on Twitter is difficult due to the varied and imprecise ways that people self-identify themselves on the social media platform. This is the first study to describe a reliable, repeatable methodology for identifying physicians on Twitter. By using this approach, we characterized the longitudinal activity of US physicians on Twitter.
We aimed to develop a reliable and repeatable methodology for identifying US physicians on Twitter and to characterize their activity on Twitter over 5 years by activity, tweeted topic, and account type.
In this study, 5 years of Twitter data (2016-2020) were mined for physician accounts. US physicians on Twitter were identified by using a custom-built algorithm to screen for physician identifiers in the Twitter handles, user profiles, and tweeted content. The number of tweets by physician accounts from the 5-year period were counted and analyzed. The top 100 hashtags were identified, categorized into topics, and analyzed.
Approximately 1 trillion tweets were mined to identify 6,399,146 (<0.001%) tweets originating from 39,084 US physician accounts. Over the 5-year period, the number of US physicians tweeting more than doubled (ie, increased by 112%). Across all 5 years, the most popular themes were general health, medical education, and mental health, and in specific years, the number of tweets related to elections (2016 and 2020), Black Lives Matter (2020), and COVID-19 (2020) increased.
Twitter has become an increasingly popular social media platform for US physicians over the past 5 years, and their use of Twitter has evolved to cover a broad range of topics, including science, politics, social activism, and COVID-19. We have developed an accurate, repeatable methodology for identifying US physicians on Twitter and have characterized their activity.
医生越来越多地使用 Twitter 作为与同事和公众交流的渠道。由于人们在社交媒体平台上自我标识的方式多种多样且不精确，因此很难在 Twitter 上找到医生。这是第一项描述可靠、可重复的方法来识别 Twitter 上的医生的研究。通过使用这种方法，我们描述了美国医生在 Twitter 上的纵向活动。
我们旨在开发一种可靠且可重复的方法来识别 Twitter 上的美国医生，并通过活动、推文主题和账户类型来描述他们在 Twitter 上 5 年的活动。
在这项研究中，挖掘了 5 年的 Twitter 数据（2016-2020 年）以获取医生账户。使用定制的算法识别 Twitter 句柄、用户资料和推文内容中的医生标识符来识别 Twitter 上的美国医生。计算了 5 年期间来自医生账户的推文数量并进行了分析。确定了前 100 个标签，对其进行分类并进行了分析。
挖掘了大约 1 万亿条推文，以识别出 6399146 条（<0.001%）来自 39084 名美国医生账户的推文。在 5 年期间，发推文的美国医生数量增加了一倍多（即增加了 112%）。在所有 5 年中，最受欢迎的主题是一般健康、医学教育和心理健康，在特定年份，与选举（2016 年和 2020 年）、“黑人的命也是命”（2020 年）和 COVID-19（2020 年）相关的推文数量增加。
在过去的 5 年中，Twitter 已成为美国医生越来越受欢迎的社交媒体平台，他们对 Twitter 的使用已发展到涵盖广泛的主题，包括科学、政治、社会活动和 COVID-19。我们已经开发出一种准确、可重复的方法来识别 Twitter 上的美国医生，并描述了他们的活动。
