Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Dec 16, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 1, 2022 - Jan 11, 2023
Date Accepted: Apr 17, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The Digital Impact of Neurosurgery Awareness Month: Retrospective Infodemiology Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Neurosurgery Awareness Month (NAM) was initiated by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Bringing neurological conditions to the forefront and sharing knowledge to enlighten the public is the goal of NAM. Digital media is key disseminating information, connecting with influencers and sharing opinions. It is crucial to understand the impact of awareness months to quantify their efficiency, global reach and to optimize resource allocation.
Objective:
The purpose of our study was to examine the digital impact of Neurosurgery Awareness Month to inform future Healthcare Awareness Campaigns.
Methods:
We used four social media assessment tools (Sprout Social, SocioViz, Symplur, and SentimentViz) and Google Trends to obtain data about the total tweets, global impressions, and sentiment from countries worldwide about NAM.
Results:
10,007 users were identified during NAM using the ‘#neurosurgery’ that fetched over 29.14 million impressions globally. Five of the top 10 most influential users were faculty neurosurgeons at US-university hospitals. Others included notable organizations and journals. Network analysis of the top 100 influencers, showed a collaboration rate of 81 percent. Only 1.6% of the total neurosurgery tweets were advocating about neurosurgery awareness during NAM. Only 13 tweets were posted by verified users using the #neurosurgeryawarenessmonth.
Conclusions:
The global digital impact of neurosurgery awareness month is nascent and support from other international organizations and neurosurgical influencers is needed to yield a significant digital reach.
Citation
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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.