Researchers randomly selected 112 articles published in "The Annals of Thoracic Surgery" and "The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery" from 2017 to 2018. From these 112 articles, half (56) were randomly selected to be in the experimental group to be tweeted by the Thoracic Surgery Social Media Network (TSSMN) and the other half to be in the control group which were not tweeted. Artcles in each group were then paired with an article in the other group based on issue, article type, and research category in order to be compared.

Four articles were then tweeted per day for 14 days by one TSSMN delegate and retweeted by 11 TSSMN delegates. Delegates were told to only retweet and not interact with the tweets in any other way. Tweets were standardized so that each included the main point of the article, the associated institutions and authors, and a link to the article, all written in simple English.

Articles in the control group were not tweeted about.