A scoping review of the use of Twitter for public health research

Edo-Osagie, Osagioduwa, De La Iglesia, Beatriz ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2675-5826, Lake, Iain ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4407-5357 and Edeghere, Obaghe (2020) A scoping review of the use of Twitter for public health research. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 122. ISSN 0010-4825

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Abstract

Public health practitioners and researchers have used traditional medical databases to study and understand public health for a long time. Recently, social media data, particularly Twitter, has seen some use for public health purposes. Every large technological development in history has had an impact on the behaviour of society. The advent of the internet and social media is no different. Social media creates public streams of communication, and scientists are starting to understand that such data can provide some level of access into the people’s opinions and situations. As such, this paper aims to review and synthesize the literature on Twitter applications for public health, highlighting current re- search and products in practice. A scoping review methodology was employed and four leading health, computer science and cross-disciplinary databases were searched. A total of 755 articles were retreived, 92 of which met the criteria for review. From the reviewed literature, six domains for the application of Twit- ter to public health were identified: (i) Surveillance; (ii) Event Detection; (iii) Pharmacovigilance; (iv) Forecasting; (v) Disease Tracking; and (vi) Geographic Identification. From our review, we were able to obtain a clear picture of the use of Twitter for public health. We gained insights into interesting observa- tions such as how the popularity of different domains changed with time, the diseases and conditions studied and the different approaches to understanding each disease, which algorithms and techniques were popular with each domain, and more.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	public health,syndromic surveillance,pharmacovigilance,event forecasting,disease tracking,disease tracking,event forecasting,syndromic surveillance,public health,health informatics,computer science applications,sdg 3 - good health and well-being ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2700/2718
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Business and Local Government Data Research Centre (former - to 2023) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Data Science and AI Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Norwich Institute for Healthy Aging University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Social Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	13 Aug 2020 23:55
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 13:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/76425
DOI:	10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.103770

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