ArticleScience advances2016
Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity.
Article in Science advances, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 622 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Extracting public opinion on typhoon disasters in China: a sina weibo case study of landfalling typhoon Muifa (2022).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Can social media reliably estimate unemployment?PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- A scoping review of factors affecting disaster risk communication, 2000-2023.Journal of education and health promotion · 2025Review
- Article
- Entity Linking for real-time geolocation of natural disasters from social network posts.PloS one · 2024Article
- Predicting economic resilience of territories in Italy during the COVID-19 first lockdown.Expert systems with applications · 2023Article
- Advancing the scientific study of prehospital mass casualty response through a Translational Science process: the T1 scoping literature review stage.European journal of trauma and emergency surgery : official publication of the European Trauma Society · 2023Article
- Young people's mental and social distress in times of international crisis: evidence from helpline calls, 2019-2022.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Public opinion changing patterns under the double-hazard scenario of natural disaster and public health event.Information processing & management · 2023Article
- A spatial-temporal graph deep learning model for urban flood nowcasting leveraging heterogeneous community features.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Social media data shed light on air-conditioning interest of heat-vulnerable regions and sociodemographic groups.One earth (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Exploring the Functioning of Online Self-Organizations during Public Health Emergencies: Patterns and Mechanism.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- The role of explainable Artificial Intelligence in high-stakes decision-making systems: a systematic review.Journal of ambient intelligence and humanized computing · 2023Article
- Social science to accelerate coastal adaptation to sea-level rise.Cambridge prisms. Coastal futures · 2023Review
- "Is a game really a reason for people to die?" Sentiment and thematic analysis of Twitter-based discourse on Indonesia soccer stampede.AIMS public health · 2023Article
- The development of new remote technologies in disaster medicine education: A scoping review.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Digital health for climate change mitigation and response: a scoping review.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2022Article
- Specifying evacuation return and home-switch stability during short-term disaster recovery using location-based data.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Analysis of Influencing Factors of Urban Community Function Loss in China under Flood Disaster Based on Social Network Analysis Model.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and an increasing intensity of natural disasters resulting from climate change. During such events, citizens turn to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency information, enables early warning systems, and helps coordinate relief efforts. In addition, the spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with the real-time monitoring and assessment of the disaster itself. We present a multiscale analysis of Twitter activity before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We examine the online response of 50 metropolitan areas of the United States and find a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy's path and hurricane-related social media activity. We show that real and perceived threats, together with physical disaster effects, are directly observable through the intensity and composition of Twitter's message stream. We demonstrate that per-capita Twitter activity strongly correlates with the per-capita economic damage inflicted by the hurricane. We verify our findings for a wide range of disasters and suggest that massive online social networks can be used for rapid assessment of damage caused by a large-scale disaster.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.