Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Dec 24, 2021)
Date Submitted: Apr 28, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
#Dissemination: a systematic review of the role of social media in circulating healthcare research
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media is a relatively new and popular means of disseminating information. However, regarding healthcare research there are concerns over the ability of social media to reach healthcare professionals, and its ability to convey a message that is representative of the research itself. To our knowledge, a review was yet to be conducted concerning the effective use of social media in communicating healthcare research
Objective:
The aim of this review was to assess the effectiveness of social media as a dissemination tool regarding healthcare research to professionals in the field.
Methods:
A scoping review was conducted to inform the search strategy. We searched EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and conducted manual searches from March 2018 to August 2019, for peer-reviewed publications in English describing the effectiveness of social media in disseminating health research to healthcare professionals. No publication time restrictions were imposed. Social media was used to identify additional peer-reviewed papers. For all selected studies, an MMAT quality assessment was undertaken.
Results:
Forty-seven studies were identified for inclusion. The papers reviewed suggest that social media was a popular and effective means of disseminating health research findings. In particular, the use of Twitter was highlighted regarding its positive relationship with citations. Crucially, dissemination on social media was advantageous over purely using traditional methods.
Conclusions:
Despite concerns over the value of using social media to encourage awareness of healthcare, overall, our review suggests a positive contribution. It provides a useful way of research to effectively reach healthcare professionals (as indicated by citation levels), whilst not misrepresenting research findings. Unfortunately, only four papers directly compared presence with absence of social media promotion. Given the apparent utility of social media for healthcare research, we would encourage more direct comparisons to be made promptly. Clinical Trial: PROSPERO Registration: CRD42018102083.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.