JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

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 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. Using this approach, we characterized the longitudinal activity of U.S. physicians on Twitter.

Objective:

To characterize 5-year activity of U.S. physicians on Twitter.

Methods:

Five years of Twitter data (2016-2020) were mined for physician accounts. U.S. physicians on Twitter were identified using a custom-built algorithm to screen for physician identifiers in the Twitter handle, user profile, and tweeted content. The number of tweets by physician accounts were counted and analyzed over the 5-year period. The top 100 hashtags were identified, categorized into topics, and analyzed.

Results:

Approximately 1 trillion tweets were mined to identify 6,399,146 tweets (0.0007%) originating from 39,084 U.S. physician accounts. Over the 5-year period, the number of U.S. physicians tweeting more than doubled (112%). Across all 5 years, the most popular themes were general health, medical education, and mental health, while in specific years, tweets related to elections (2016, 2020), Black Lives Matter (2020), and Covid-19 (2020) increased.

Conclusions:

Twitter has become an increasingly popular social media platform for U.S. physicians over the past 5 years, and their use has evolved to cover a broad range of topics from science, politics, social activism, to Covid-19. We have developed an accurate, repeatable methodology to identify U.S. physicians on Twitter and characterize their activity.