Gender Differences in Twitter Use and Influence Among Health Policy and Health Services Researchers

摘要

Ample research has documented the lower visibility and success of women compared with men in academic medicine. Against this setting, social media platforms such as Twitter offer academics opportunities to promote their research, network professionally, gain visibility, and, in turn, foster opportunities for career advancement. These opportunities are particularly critical in health policy and health services research, in which dissemination of policy-relevant research and engagement with health care decision-makers impacts academic influence, recognition, and promotion. Herein, we describe gender differences in Twitter use and influence among health services researchers. Methods | Using publicly available data, we identified names and affiliations of all 6442 speakers and coauthors of research presented at AcademyHealth's 2018 Annual Research Meeting, the largest academic meeting for health services research. Using this sampling group, we conducted online searches to identify each attendee's degree(s), title/position, and gender, and identified Twitter users by searching for each individual's Twitter profile and handle. We included individuals who had an MD, PhD, or equivalent and worked as independent non-trainee-level researchers in the United States. We used Twitter's Application Program Interface to extract metrics on Twitter use for each individual and all accounts in their social networks, including the most recent 3200 tweets. Review of this study was waived by the University of Pennsylvania's institutional review board, which determined that informed consent was not applicable to this study because it is based on publicly available data.