They obtained a list of EM influencers from two published network analyses, and used a sample of 50 that meet the criteria of being on one of the lists, living in the United States, and having recognition within the EM Twitter community.

The George Washington University Libraries Tweetsets data platform was used to access the "Coronavirus Tweet IDs" dataset. From this dataset, tweets from their EM sample were extracted from the dates of March 3, 2020 to May 1, 2020. Only original tweets and quote tweets were extracted, not retweets and replies. They obtained a sample of 1315 tweets.