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#neoTwitter: evaluation of its use within the neonatal-perinatal community

Journal of Perinatology volume 42, pages 1409–1411 (2022)Cite this article

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Twitter is an important tool for digital communication and a growing area for health research [1]. However, given the vast amount of information available to users daily (e.g., 500 million tweets/day), it is important to organize tweets so that users can access relevant information efficiently [2]. One way of doing so is through hashtags, used to label tweets [2]. In neonatology, several specific hashtags have been used; however, a unifying umbrella hashtag broadly targeting neonatal content had not been specified.

On World Prematurity Day (November 17, 2020), our group registered the hashtag #neoTwitter in Symplur’s ‘Healthcare Hashtag Project’ to help unify neonatal content under a common hashtag [3]. We sought to evaluate neonatal stakeholders’ subsequent use of #neoTwitter.

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Fig. 1: Growth of the #neoTwitter community.

Data availability

Given Twitter’s Developer Agreement and Policy for Content redistribution, we can only share the Tweet IDs. The 53,707 Tweet IDs are available upon request from the corresponding author.

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank the whole digital neonatal-perinatal community for engaging and utilizing tweets using #neoTwitter.

Funding

AK receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) [APP1161379]. NAB receives funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) [K23HD101651]. The contents of this paper are solely the responsibility of the individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC or NIH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Alvaro Proaño

  2. SAHMRI Women and Kids, South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amy Keir

  3. Department of Pediatrics, Allan Waters Family Simulation Center and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Douglas M. Campbell

  4. Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA

    Benjamin Courchia

  5. Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Michael Narvey

  6. Division of Neonatology and Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Nicolas A. Bamat

Authors
  1. Alvaro Proaño
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  2. Amy Keir
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  3. Douglas M. Campbell
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  4. Benjamin Courchia
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  5. Michael Narvey
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  6. Nicolas A. Bamat
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Contributions

AP, AK, DMC, BC, MN, NAB did the conception and design of this study. AP did the analysis and interpretation. AP, AK, DMC, BC, MN, NAB contributed with intellectual content to the drafting of the manuscript and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alvaro Proaño.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethics approval

This study was considered exempt by the Tulane University Institutional Review Board (Ref#2021-1560).

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Proaño, A., Keir, A., Campbell, D.M. et al. #neoTwitter: evaluation of its use within the neonatal-perinatal community. J Perinatol 42, 1409–1411 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41372-022-01373-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41372-022-01373-x

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