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Breast Cancer Screening and Social Media: a Content Analysis of Evidence Use and Guideline Opinions on Twitter

Overview of attention for article published in Journal of Cancer Education, January 2017
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (84th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (90th percentile)

Mentioned by

twitter
14 X users
facebook
1 Facebook page

Citations

dimensions_citation
43 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
122 Mendeley
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Title
Breast Cancer Screening and Social Media: a Content Analysis of Evidence Use and Guideline Opinions on Twitter
Published in
Journal of Cancer Education, January 2017
DOI 10.1007/s13187-017-1168-9
Pubmed ID
Authors

Anthony Nastasi, Tyler Bryant, Joseph K. Canner, Mark Dredze, Melissa S. Camp, Neeraja Nagarajan

Abstract

There is ongoing debate regarding the best mammography screening practices. Twitter has become a powerful tool for disseminating medical news and fostering healthcare conversations; however, little work has been done examining these conversations in the context of how users are sharing evidence and discussing current guidelines for breast cancer screening. To characterize the Twitter conversation on mammography and assess the quality of evidence used as well as opinions regarding current screening guidelines, individual tweets using mammography-related hashtags were prospectively pulled from Twitter from 5 November 2015 to 11 December 2015. Content analysis was performed on the tweets by abstracting data related to user demographics, content, evidence use, and guideline opinions. Standard descriptive statistics were used to summarize the results. Comparisons were made by demographics, tweet type (testable claim, advice, personal experience, etc.), and user type (non-healthcare, physician, cancer specialist, etc.). The primary outcomes were how users are tweeting about breast cancer screening, the quality of evidence they are using, and their opinions regarding guidelines. The most frequent user type of the 1345 tweets was "non-healthcare" with 323 tweets (32.5%). Physicians had 1.87 times higher odds (95% CI, 0.69-5.07) of providing explicit support with a reference and 11.70 times higher odds (95% CI, 3.41-40.13) of posting a tweet likely to be supported by the scientific community compared to non-healthcare users. Only 2.9% of guideline tweets approved of the guidelines while 14.6% claimed to be confused by them. Non-healthcare users comprise a significant proportion of participants in mammography conversations, with tweets often containing claims that are false, not explicitly backed by scientific evidence, and in favor of alternative "natural" breast cancer prevention and treatment. Furthermore, users appear to have low approval and confusion regarding screening guidelines. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to educate and disseminate accurate information to the general public regarding breast cancer prevention modalities, emphasizing the safety of mammography and the harms of replacing conventional prevention and treatment modalities with unsubstantiated alternatives.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 14 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 122 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 1 <1%
Unknown 121 99%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 16 13%
Student > Master 16 13%
Student > Ph. D. Student 14 11%
Other 9 7%
Student > Doctoral Student 7 6%
Other 24 20%
Unknown 36 30%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 29 24%
Social Sciences 10 8%
Computer Science 9 7%
Nursing and Health Professions 7 6%
Psychology 6 5%
Other 14 11%
Unknown 47 39%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 10. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 24 October 2019.
All research outputs
#3,488,726
of 25,083,571 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Cancer Education
#104
of 1,286 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#67,668
of 429,204 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Cancer Education
#3
of 20 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,083,571 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 86th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,286 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 91% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 429,204 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 20 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.