Wahbeh, A., Nasralah, T., Al-Ramahi, M., & El-Gayar, O. (2020). Mining physicians’ opinions on social media to obtain insights into COVID-19: mixed methods analysis. JMIR public health and surveillance, 6(2), e19276. https://publichealth.jmir.org/2020/2/e19276/?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=JMIR_TrendMD_0

University of California, Berkeley

This paper looked at how medical professionals was using Twitter to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Most used it to talk about recommendations and needed action, while others also talked about misleading information, the healthcare system, symptoms, testing, and more.

Mining Physicians’ Opinions on Social Media to Obtain Insights Into COVID-19: Mixed Methods Analysis

The Onalytica website, which provides influencer marketing softtware, and a list of top health care professionals with influence score rankings was used to identify medical professionals on Twitter. They identified 119 medical professionals for this study who were discussing the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter. 
Crimson Hexagon was then used to extract tweets from the identified medical professionals between the dates of December 1,2019 and April 1, 2020. They extracted a total of 10,096 tweets. 

Mining Physicians’ Opinions on Social Media to Obtain Insights Into COVID-19: Mixed Methods Analysis - data collection

This was a mixed methods paper in which both data analytics and qualitative analysis was used. 

To start the analysis, they first analyzed a random subset of 250 of the 10,096 tweets to check if the tweets were actually relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers themselves independently labeled these tweets as relevant or irrelevant , and they established interrater reliability and got a Fleiss score of 0.628, meaning they had "substantial agreement." From this, they used NVivo to perform automatic coding of the relevant tweets. As this gave them the main code and subcode analysis, they were able to identify 8 different categories for these tweets plus one category for irrelevant tweets. 

For quantitative analysis, Crimson Hexagon was used to look at the social media statistics. 

Mining Physicians’ Opinions on Social Media to Obtain Insights Into COVID-19: Mixed Methods Analysis - data analysis

- the majority of tweets are from medical professionals from the United States
- 92% of the 10,096 tweets were found to be relevant 
- distribution of tweets in categories: actions and recommendations (28%), fighting misinformation (20%), information and knowledge (9%), health care system (9%), symptoms and illness (8%), immunity (7%), testing (6%), and infection and transmission (5%).
- number of tweets increased as more cases occurred, with tweets about actions and recommendations increasing the most drastically (peaking in March) followed by tweets fighting misinformation 
- medical professionals have been using Twitter to share knowledge with each other and to the public about the COVID-10 pandemic, focusing on topics that tell the public what to do, fighting misinformation, knowledge about infection, symptoms, testing, and the immune system, and concern about the healthcare system and healthcare workers.

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