Twitter’s role in the dissemination of information regarding medical imaging

Introduction: With Twitter being one of the most popular social media websites currently active on the internet, the micro-blogging application allows for monitoring of world-wide social trends and subject to metric analysis (Zubiaga, Spina, Martínez, & Fresno, 2014). With professionals utilising Twitter for marketing and inter-professional communication, this project aims to investigate the current role Twitter has in the dissemination of information regarding radiography from a quantitative perspective with inferential statistics for correlation with citations of journal articles, and qualitative analysis with a deductive content analysis to observe the emerging trends on Twitter regarding medical imaging (Lawson & Cowling, 2014).Methodology: By using key search terms that relate to the professions of radiography and radiology, an international analysis of current activity in regards to radiography will be conducted, with quantitative analysis to determine overall activity and correlation between Twitter shares and citations of online journal articles, and content analysis allowing the qualitative analysis of emerging trends on the social media platform.ResultsContent analysis revealed trends of marketing, inter-professional communication, discussion from the general public, and public awareness campaigns regarding medical imaging and other medical radiation sciences. The quantitative component revealed significant data volume differences between key words, and it was determined that was no statistical correlation between the Twitter shares and the citations of online journal articles using a 95% confidence interval under Chi-squared testing.Conclusion: There is a broad audience using Twitter to disseminate information regarding medical radiation sciences, as determined by the content analysis methodology. There is no statistical correlation between Twitter shares of online journal articles and online citations of the same journal articles, inferring that Twitter activity does not parallel online journal article dissemination for the consumption of research in the online domain. The content analysis performed demonstrates that key trends on Twitter regarding medical imaging are job vacancy advertisements, advertisements for medical imaging practices, patient experiences with medical imaging, and sharing content from other social media outlets concerning medical imaging.