Social Media in Medicine

Margaret Chisolm, Margaret S. Chisolm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138665385
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317215455
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The use of social media around the world has exploded in recent years, with the number of monthly active users of Facebook and Twitter estimated to be one billion and one quarter billion, respectively. Physicians and medical trainees are among the users of social media, raising questions of how Facebook, Twitter, and other novel online tools may best be harnessed to further medical research, patient care, and educational pursuits. Because social media enables an immediate exchange of information and ideas around shared areas of interest, it has fostered communication and collaboration among a global network of researchers, clinicians, patients, and learners. Social Media in Medicine reviews a range of topics, from research ethics to medical education, and includes personal reflections by clinicians and learners that represent diverse opinions about the role of social media in medicine. The book is relevant to all healthcare stakeholders and will hopefully encourage ideas and questions to generate more research into the use of social media in medical research, patient care, and education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Review of Psychiatry.

Perspectives on social media in and as research: A synthetic review

NATALIE T. LAFFERTY¹& ANNALISA MANCA²

¹Library and Learning Centre, Centre for Technology and Innovation in Learning, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

²Medical Education Institute, School of Medicine, University of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital & Medical School, UK.

Abstract

With the growth of social media use in both the private and public spheres, researchers are currently exploring the new opportunities and practices offered by these tools in the research lifecycle. This area is still in its infancy: As methodological approaches and methods are being tested – mainly through pragmatic and exploratory approaches – practices are being shaped and negotiated by the actors involved in research. A further element of complexity is added by the ambivalent status of social media within research activities. They can be both a tool – for recruitment, data collection, analysis – and data – as what constitutes the corpus to be analysed – both in an observational and interactive domain. This synthetic analysis of the literature is aimed at identifying how social media are currently being used in research and how they fit into the research lifecycle. We identify and discuss emerging evidence and trends in the adoption of social media in research, which can be used and applied by psychiatry research practitioners as a framework to inform the development of a personalized research network and social media strategy in research.

Introduction

The birth of the ‘read, write web’ and ‘Web 2.0’ technologies has seen a proliferation of social media (SoMe) tools providing new opportunities for connecting and communicating, and for creating and sharing information. Whilst many of these tools and technologies were not developed with a specific intention to support research or education, as individuals have used these tools they have applied and made use of them in their professional lives. SoMe is providing new opportunities and there is a sense of being on the cusp of a new wave in research (Bartling & Friesike, 2014) that challenges traditional modes of research dissemination and offers new opportunities for engaging with patients and the public at large.

While SoMe have been identified as having the potential to change the way researchers work, collaborate and communicate (Archibald & Clark, 2014; Das et al., 2014; Grosseck & Holotescu, 2011; Kapp et al., 2013; Ovadia, 2009) both amongst themselves and with participants and the public, the actual use of SoMe in research is still in its infancy (O’Connor, 2013; van Osch & Coursaris, 2014). In this paper we review some of the emerging evidence and commentaries on the adoption and role of SoMe in research which may inform their further application in medical and healthcare research.

Objectives

This paper presents a synthetic literature review of published studies that used SoMe in any stage of the research cycle and studies or commentaries that addressed the topic of SoMe use in research. As such, we briefly summarize findings, opinions and discussion about the use of SoMe in research, including examples from psychiatry, and we discuss how the literature can be used to help researchers support the development of personalized research frameworks.

Through this synthetic analysis we attempt to answer the following research questions:

1.How is SoMe being used in current research?

2.What tools are being used and how?

3.How does SoMe fit into elements of the research lifecycle?

4.What are the perceived and evident benefits?

5.What are the main challenges that need to be addressed?

Methods

Three electronic databases (Taylor & Francis, Wiley and PubMed) were searched for papers containing the following keywords in the title or abstract: ‘research AND social media OR twitter OR blog OR facebook OR microblog OR digital’ between 2008 and 2014. Both authors then evaluated all the paper abstracts obtained for relevance and 56 out of 110 articles were identified and mutually agreed as suitable for inclusion in the review.

Due to their active engagement with SoMe in research and their familiarity with the issues involved, both authors felt the corpus needed to be further supplemented with papers, reports and guides that have informed our own use of SoMe in research and educational practice along with papers shared by our Twitter networks.

Due to the field of research analysed being rather immature, and therefore lacking methodological diversity (van Osch & Coursaris, 2014), we also included commentaries, books and reviews to take into account the wide range of current debate and theorization on this topic.

Preliminary considerations

We performed a preliminary thematic analysis of the selected literature, categorizing the studies according to the use or discussion of SoMe under the stages of the research lifecycle. Although research is an iterative and non-linear process (Nicholas & Rowlands, 2011), placing activities and tools into a four-step schematic approach was useful to identify the current trends in the use of SoMe in research. The four steps we examined were (1) the planning phase, including identifying the research topic, potential collaborators and initial review of the literature, (2) the development of the project, including a more detailed literature review, identifying underlying theories and methodologies, planning the project timeline, (3) the implementation of the research, i.e. enrolling participants, gathering data, and then analysis and interpretation of the data, and (4) dissemination of the research findings and engagement with the research community and the wider public.

The preliminary thematic analysis on the selected literature highlighted various complexities, as some research procedures clearly overlap several stages of the lifecycle in cases where SoMe is the source of research data. For this reason, after a brief discussion about SoMe in the research lifecycle, we report and discuss the role of ‘SoMe as data’ as a separate strand. We consider this using a model we adapted from Moreno et al. (2013), looking at SoMe as a source of data in two complementary dimensions. The aim of Moreno et al.’s paper was to provide a set of key ethical considerations for both researchers and institutional review boards (IRBs) or ethics committees called to review research projects involving SoMe. This highlights the various degrees of complexity surrounding this area, which touches researchers, participants and reviewers in different but connected strands.

Social media in the lifecycle of a research project

With levels of scepticism around the use of SoMe in research, a helpful way to consider their potential and application is to look at their role in relation to the research cycle. A major international study of the use of SoMe in research (Nicholas & Rowlands, 2011; Rowlands et al., 2011) indicates that SoMe are being used to identify research opportunities, support collaboration and to disseminate research findings. Procter et al. (2010) found that UK researchers valued the informality SoMe offered and that many were using at least one SoMe tool. Whilst researchers in health and medical sciences may not have the highest levels of adoption of SoMe (Procter et al., 2010) those that do use them find them of much more value in the research lifecycle than researchers from other disciplines (Nicholas & Rowlands, 2011). Emerging key perceived benefits of using SoME include the ability to connect with researchers across disciplines and geographic divides, and the ability to build and maintain research communities. These communities and networks are supported by platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, CiteULike and Twitter. In education the concepts of personal learning networks (PLN) and personal learning environments (PLE) have emerged (Attwell, 2007) to refer to the interaction between different agents and technologies involved in one’s learning process. Similarly, as researchers increasingly adopt technology to support their own research, they are developing a personal research environment (PRE) and SoMe is facilitating connections across personal research networks (PRN). However, lack of appreciation of the benefits of SoMe together with perceived risks can pose a barrier for adoption (Davis, 1989). There are concerns over privacy, whilst the blurring of professional and personal online spaces and digital identities see work creeping into personal time (Cann et al., 2011). Other constraints include a sense of information overload, with an overwhelming number of tools to grasp and appreciate which ones can be trusted. Issues of trust in relation to integrity and quality of information also surround scholarly communication on SoMe platforms (Procter et al., 2010).

Planning

Developing a PRN takes time but brings benefits, increasing the connectedness of researchers, providing a platform to ask questions while also serving as a way of professionally filtering information through trusted network connections (Cann et al., 2011) and so helping to minimize a sense of information overload. Conversations across networks may identify topics for research or signpost researchers to funding opportunities or to new collaborators. The use of hashtags can help tracking conversations and content. Hashtags are words, acronyms or unspaced phrases preceded by the # symbol, used to tag or label posts, content and conversations in SoMe sites, which can then be found by searching for that particular hashtag. The emergence of Symplur (Symplur, 2014) as a register and archive of healthcare hashtags provides a large databank of Twitter conversations around healthcare across all specialities including psychiatry. SoMe as a source of big data can be integrated with other offline data sources and monitored to gain an insight into current trends, and to identify opportunities in research (Ovadia, 2009) or potential collaborators. SoMe has changed the flow of information and led to a democratization of information (Quinton, 2013) . Researchers can review this data, and join online conversations and networks, making it possible to crowd-source research ideas and involve patient groups in the co-design and production of research (Henderson et al., 2013; Ho, 2014).

Development

As a research idea is explored, social citation tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, Colwiz and CiteULike can be used to support a literature review around an initial idea (Allen et al., 2013; Cann et al., 2011; Fausto et al., 2012; Gardois et al., 2012; Ovadia, 2013; Shema et al., 2012). Interest groups exist in all of these sites, again supporting connectiveness and networking. A search in Mendeley for groups focusing on ‘mental health’ revealed 83 groups (Mendeley, 2014).

Individuals can create a project group in any of these tools, whilst Colwiz also offers research teams project management tools with shared calendars and tasks that can support project development. Google Drive and Google Docs support collaborative writing, social commenting and development of surveys (e.g. Cann et al., 2011), whilst tools like Evernote with its shared notebooks provide a way to share web clippings and other information to support project work. There are endless tools that can be used to support the development of a project. Communication tools such as Skype and Google Hangouts are particularly helpful for connecting collaborators across institutions and geographical regions, helping to reduce both the costs and time needed for travel (Cann et al., 2011; Nicholas & Rowlands, 2011).

Implementation

Many SoMe tools in a PRE can also be used in the implementation phase of a project. Some researchers may blog about their own work or post queries and problems to their PRN on Facebook, Academia.edu, etc., which can be solved by the collective wisdom of the network (Bartling & Friesike, 2014; Cann et al., 2011).These tools complement traditional approaches to research throughout the project lifecycle. SoMe have also emerged as a mechanism for support across research communities. An example is #PhDChat (Ford et al., 2014), a Twitter chat which has developed into an international community providing mutual support and advice for both full-time and part-time PhD researchers across multiple disciplines including education, the humanities and healthcare.

As previously highlighted, SoMe, as well as supporting the research process may be the focus of the actual research as either a source of big data or as a means to recruit and interact with research subjects. Where this is the case it plays a pivotal role in the implementation of the project and we explore this in further detail below as we consider SoMe as the focus of research.

Dissemination

As the research cycle reaches its conclusion with publication and dissemination of findings, SoMe can help break down the boundaries between research communities and the wider public (Fordis et al., 2011) . Publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals continues to have high currency and is essential for all researchers in terms of career progression. Whilst some researchers blog, there is still wariness of content published on blogs due to the lack of peer review; indeed, this is seen as a barrier to engaging with new forms of scholarly communication despite emerging views that the current form of peer review will become unsustainable (Procter et al., 2010). There are calls to move from filtering before publication to filtering post publication (Mandavilli, 2011; Smith, 2010). In the worlds of mathematics and physics, public discourse on a paper before publication is common and this debate is now seen on blogs (Mandavilli, 2011).

In medicine, post-publication discourse is occurring via Twitter on hashtags such as #FOAMed (Nickson, 2014), blogs (Shema et al., 2012) and open journal clubs running on Twitter and Facebook, including #BlueJC, which is supported by the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Leung et al., 2013). Platforms such as Academia.edu have plans to launch a post-publication peer review feature to serve as a filtering mechanism and help academics identify which research can be trusted (van Noorden, 2014). As SoMe tools are used to comment on and share, research altmetrics (‘alternative metrics’) provide a mechanism to measure the wider reach and social impact of scholarly work supplementing the traditional notions of citation impact and Hirsch number (Fausto et al., 2012; Kwok, 2013; Ovadia, 2013) . Altmetrics serve to quantify the social activity around individual publications, and journals are beginning to display the social mentions of a paper including how many times a paper has been tweeted, saved to reference tools such as Mendeley and CiteULike, shared on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or blogged about. Social sharing options on publications make it easier to sha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Social media in medicine: The volume that Twitter built
• 1. Perspectives on social media in and as research: A synthetic review
• 2. Ethical issues when using social media for health outside professional relationships
• 3. Online professionalism: A synthetic review
• 4. Online social support networks
• 5. Social media for lifelong learning
• 6. Live tweeting in medicine: ‘Tweeting the meeting’
• 7. Social media and medical education: Exploring the potential of Twitter as a learning tool
• 8. Social media, medicine and the modern journal club
• 9. A personal reflection on social media in medicine: I stand, no wiser than before
• 10. Personal reflections on exploring social media in medicine
• 11. My three shrinks: Personal stories of social media exploration
• Index