These Days, Find Diabetes ‘Opinion Leaders’ on Twitter – Medscape
Increasingly, social media platforms such as Twitter are giving knowledgeable but lesser-known experts on medical topics like diabetes a prominent voice.
“Key opinion leaders” in medical fields are those traditionally with the greatest academic expertise, high publication counts with first and last authorships, and large co-author networks.
An emerging crop of “digital opinion leaders,” less-established researchers, or even clinicians have garnered…….
Increasingly, social media platforms such as Twitter are giving knowledgeable but lesser-known experts on medical topics like diabetes a prominent voice.
“Key opinion leaders” in medical fields are those traditionally with the greatest academic expertise, high publication counts with first and last authorships, and large co-author networks.
An emerging crop of “digital opinion leaders,” less-established researchers, or even clinicians have garnered large followings on Twitter because they share valuable scientific content and engage in dialogue with others in their areas of expertise, especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic.
An estimated 29.1% of healthcare workers now use social media daily to exchange medical knowledge with their peers, noted Simon Leigh, PhD, head of digital innovation & insights at the healthcare consultancy VISFO Health, and colleagues.
Leigh and colleagues conducted the first-ever analysis to “explore the link between bibliometric and digital activity on a global medical scale,” studying nearly 3000 diabetes researchers who issued more than 100,000 tweets.
Publication count and first/last authorships were unrelated to tweet frequency or engagement, and the investigators with the most academic co-authors were less likely to tweet than were those with smaller networks. The findings were published online December 7 in Pharmaceutical Medicine.
“There are your heavy-hitting academics who are always going to be there…But your community clinicians who aren’t on national guidelines, who aren’t pioneering in new research but are dealing with patients day-to-day, these voices are just as important as the ones from the big-hitting [key opinion leaders] because they’re still being driven primarily by patient experiences. So I see Twitter as an opportunity,” Leigh told Medscape Medical News.
Key Opinion Leaders Aren’t Taking to Twitter
The investigators reviewed all diabetes-related research publications (n = 44,135) in PubMed from August 1, 2018 through August 1, 2020 and identified all authors whose names appeared at least once. Then they identified all global diabetes-related tweets, retweets, and comments on Twitter — a total of 20.6 million — for the same period. These included tweets using hashtags from major conferences such as the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting.
They then combined the two lists, yielding a total of 2686 unique global healthcare professionals who had published at least two diabetes-related publications and who altogether posted a total of 110,346 tweets.
Not surprisingly, diabetes researchers with more followers on Twitter were more likely to tweet about diabetes. But interestingly, those with a greater number of diabetes-related publications per month were no more likely to post diabetes content on Twitter than were those with fewer publications (P = .159). Moreover, those publishing seven or more papers per month — who may be considered “key opinion leaders” — were significantly less likely to publish content on Twitter than were those publishing fewer than one paper per …….
