Analysis of a New York Times article on the public's perception of dermatologists

摘要

The American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) formally responded on January 21.2014, to the New York Times article "Patients' Costs Skyrocket; Specialists' Incomes Soar," by Elisabeth Rosenthal published on January 19, 2014 (part 6 of the "Paying Till it Hurts" series). The AAD's statement was certainly sensible, and defending one's specialty from potentially misleading and biased information is a worthy pursuit. While the article raised concern in dermatology circles, we questioned how much impact this article is likely to have and sought to analyze the impact of this particular article on the public's perception of dermatologists. This investigation involved searching Twitter, one of the main forums in which our society shares and discusses current events, for tweets related to the January 19, 2014, New York Times article. According to Topsy, a popular Twitter analysis website, there were only 2600 tweets between January 18,2014, and February 1,2014, sharing or discussing the New York Times article by Ms Rosenthal. We searched Twitter, and 1964 of the 2600 tweets included the link provided in the New York Times article. We categorized these 1964 tweets (Table) (see also eTable 1 in the Supplement).