ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2021
The Use of Social Media for Health Research Purposes: Scoping Review.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Long COVID Optimal Health Programme to Enhance Mental and Physical Health: A Feasibility Randomised Controlled Trial.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2025Trial
- Enhancing Efficiency and Reach Using Facebook to Recruit Breast Cancer Survivors for a Telephone-Based Supportive Care Randomized Trial During the COVID-19 Pandemic.JCO oncology practice · 2023Trial
- Review
- Perceived Stress, Illness and Stigma in Patients with Alopecia Areata.Acta dermato-venereologica · 2026Article
- Comparison of Artificial Intelligence Tools With Human Coding for Sentiment, Topic, and Thematic Analysis Tasks of Public Health Datasets During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia: Case Study.Online journal of public health informatics · 2026Article
- Benchmark evaluation of video large language models in quality assessment of science popularization videos for dry eye.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Creating a Youth Sex Trafficking Prevention Curriculum Using CBPAR: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons Learned.Journal of child sexual abuse · 2026Article
- Assessment of social media use as an educational intervention on antimicrobial resistance targeted at nurses.Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da U S P · 2026Article
- Barriers and facilitators to integrating Persian medicine into primary health care in Iran: a qualitative study from the perspective of community health workers and community health supervisors.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2025Article
- Advances in Animal Disease Surveillance and Information Systems and Their Role in Disease Control and Prevention: Implications in Ethiopia.Veterinary medicine and science · 2025Review
- Athletes' access to, attitudes towards and experiences of help-seeking for mental health: a scoping review.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Infertility trends in China: analyzing temporal changes, public demand, and demographic differences based on Baidu index.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Can Mobile Health Applications, Social Media, and Telemedicine Assist with Obesity Treatment?Current obesity reports · 2025Review
- Combining Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Corpus Linguistics to Analyze Unstructured Web-Based Patient Experience Data: Case Study of Modafinil Experiences.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- "Do all bisexuals have this power?": An exploratory study of "crippling nicotine addiction," identity, and other emergent themes in vaping messages on QueerTok.SSM. Qualitative research in health · 2024Article
- A Protocol for the Inclusion of Minoritized Persons in Alzheimer Disease Research From the ADNI3 Diversity Taskforce.JAMA network open · 2024Observational
- Methods and Annotated Data Sets Used to Predict the Gender and Age of Twitter Users: Scoping Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- The Utilization of Natural Language Processing for Analyzing Social Media Data in Nursing Research: A Scoping Review.Journal of nursing management · 2024Article
- Use of social media in recruiting young people to mental health research: a scoping review.BMJ open · 2023Article
- GLP-1 Receptor Agonists and Related Mental Health Issues; Insights from a Range of Social Media Platforms Using a Mixed-Methods Approach.Brain sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAs social media are increasingly used worldwide, more and more scientists are relying on them for their health-related projects. However, social media features, methodologies, and ethical issues are unclear so far because, to our knowledge, there has been no overview of this relatively young field of research.
objectiveThis scoping review aimed to provide an evidence map of the different uses of social media for health research purposes, their fields of application, and their analysis methods.
methodsWe followed the scoping review methodologies developed by Arksey and O'Malley and the Joanna Briggs Institute. After developing search strategies based on keywords (eg, social media, health research), comprehensive searches were conducted in the PubMed/MEDLINE and Web of Science databases. We limited the search strategies to documents written in English and published between January 1, 2005, and April 9, 2020. After removing duplicates, articles were screened at the title and abstract level and at the full text level by two independent reviewers. One reviewer extracted data, which were descriptively analyzed to map the available evidence.
resultsAfter screening 1237 titles and abstracts and 407 full texts, 268 unique papers were included, dating from 2009 to 2020 with an average annual growth rate of 32.71% for the 2009-2019 period. Studies mainly came from the Americas (173/268, 64.6%, including 151 from the United States). Articles used machine learning or data mining techniques (60/268) to analyze the data, discussed opportunities and limitations of the use of social media for research (59/268), assessed the feasibility of recruitment strategies (45/268), or discussed ethical issues (16/268). Communicable (eg, influenza, 40/268) and then chronic (eg, cancer, 24/268) diseases were the two main areas of interest.
conclusionsSince their early days, social media have been recognized as resources with high potential for health research purposes, yet the field is still suffering from strong heterogeneity in the methodologies used, which prevents the research from being compared and generalized. For the field to be fully recognized as a valid, complementary approach to more traditional health research study designs, there is now a need for more guidance by types of applications of social media for health research, both from a methodological and an ethical perspective. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): RR2-10.1136/bmjopen-2020-040671.
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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.