B. J. Smart1, N. Nagarajan2, J. K. Canner2, M. Dredze3, E. B. Schneider2, M. Luu1, Z. Berger4,5,6, J. A. Myers1 1Rush University Medical Center,Department Of Surgery,Chicago, IL, USA 2Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Department Of Surgery,Baltimore, MD, USA 3Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Department Of Computer Science,Baltimore, MD, USA 4Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Division Of General Internal Medicine,Baltimore, MD, USA 5Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Berman Institute Of Bioethics,Baltimore, MD, USA 6Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine,Department Of Health, Behavior And Society, Johns Hopkins School Of Public Health,Baltimore, MD, USA
Introduction:
Billions of people worldwide use social media platforms to share information and surgeons are beginning to recognize the potential of these platforms for furthering surgical education. Social media such as Twitter allows educators to cost-effectively distribute information across geographical borders while allowing learners to customize the information they receive. However, there has been a lack of research on assessing the use of social media to further surgical education. We sought to examine the use of Twitter for surgical education.
Methods:
Individual tweets were identified using the hashtag ‘surgicaleducation’ for one entire month. Individual users who generated these tweets were identified to determine user characteristics such as location, gender and type of affiliation. The content of the tweets were qualitatively analyzed to determine whom the tweet was directed towards, the overall purpose, the associated surgical discipline, the contents of links, and if the tweets were associated with a scholarly conference.
Results:
In total, 84 English language tweets with the hashtag ‘surgicaleducation’ were collected with 52 unique users. Overall, 48 (57.14%) of the tweets were directed exclusively towards other clinicians and a majority of the tweets contained content that was an opinion about surgical education (26 [30.95%]) followed by promotion of scholarly activity (23 [27.38%]) and announcing an educational event or opportunity (13 [15.48%]). In total, 18 (21.43%) of the tweets were related to a surgical conference. There were 53 (63.10%) tweets that had an associated link and of these links a majority were to a peer-reviewed journal article (19 [35.85%]), followed by healthcare-related websites (15 [28.30%]), and multi-media (10 [18.87%]). A majority of the users were located in the United States (32 [61.54%]) with the central (10 [31.25%]) and northeast (9 [28.13%]) regions of the United States having the most users. 28 (53.85%) of the users were private users, of whom 17 (60.71%) were identified as male. Overall, 29 (55.77%) were affiliated with university hospitals, 8 (15.38%) with non-profit organizations and 6 (11.54%), with peer-reviewed journals.
Conclusion:
Social medial platforms, such as Twitter, are a powerful tool to share information in the field of surgical education. Of those who use Twitter for surgical education, most are from university programs in the United States and use the medium to share personal opinions, promote scholarly activity and inform others about educational events and opportunities. Future efforts should be directed at better understanding and utilizing this new paradigm in scholarly communication.