JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Twitter has become a dominant source of public health data and a widely used method to investigate and understand public health-related issues in the U.S. and internationally.

Objective:

The primary focus of this scoping review is to provide a comprehensive overview of relevant research studies that have used Twitter as a data source in public health research to explore, monitor, and disseminate a variety of public health concerns.

Methods:

A literature search for Twitter and public health was conducted by searching specific keywords on five databases from 2008 to 2021. We reviewed the literature of peer-reviewed empirical research articles that included original research in English speaking published journals.

Results:

Thirty-eight articles that focused primarily on Twitter as a data source met the criteria for review. Two themes emerged from the literature: (1) language analysis to identify health threats and physical and mental health understandings about people and societies, and (2) public health surveillance related to leading causes of mortality. Findings suggest that Twitter language data can be mined to detect mental health conditions, disease surveillance, and death rates, identify heart-related content, show how health-related information is shared and discussed, and provide access to users’ opinions and feelings.

Conclusions:

Twitter analyses show promise in the field of public health communication and surveillance. It may be essential to use Twitter to supplement more conventional public health surveillance approaches. Twitter can potentially fortify researchers’ ability to collect data in a timely way and improve the early identification of potential health threats. Twitter can also help identify subtle signals in language for understanding physical and mental health conditions.