Scholars are increasingly using the microblogging service Twitter as a communication platform. Since citing is a central practice of scholarly communication, we investigated whether and how scholars cite on Twitter. We conducted interviews and harvested 46,515 tweets from a sample of 28 scholars and found that they do cite on Twitter, though often indirectly. Twitter citations are part of a fast-moving conversation that participants believe reflects scholarly impact. Twitter citation metrics could augment traditional citation analysis, supporting a "scientometrics 2.0."

BackgroundAs social media becomes increasingly popular online venues for engaging in communication about public health issues, it is important to understand how users promote knowledge and awareness about specific topics.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to examine the frequency of discussion and differences by race and ethnicity of cancer-related topics among unique users via Twitter.MethodsTweets were collected from April 1, 2014 through January 21, 2015 using the Twitter public streaming Application Programming Interface (API) to collect 1% of public tweets. Twitter users were classified into racial and ethnic groups using a new text mining approach applied to English-only tweets. Each ethnic group was then analyzed for frequency in cancer-related terms within user timelines, investigated for changes over time and across groups, and measured for statistical significance.ResultsObservable usage patterns of the terms "cancer", "breast cancer", "prostate cancer", and "lung cancer" between Caucasian and African American groups were evident across the study period. We observed some variation in the frequency of term usage during months known to be labeled as cancer awareness months, particularly September, October, and November. Interestingly, we found that of the terms studied, "colorectal cancer" received the least Twitter attention.ConclusionsThe findings of the study provide evidence that social media can serve as a very powerful and important tool in implementing and disseminating critical prevention, screening, and treatment messages to the community in real-time. The study also introduced and tested a new methodology of identifying race and ethnicity among users of the social media. Study findings highlight the potential benefits of social media as a tool in reducing racial and ethnic disparities.

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Although people disclose illicit activities such as drug use online, we currently know little about what information people choose to disclose and share or whether there are differences in behavior depending on the illicit activity being disclosed. This exploratory mixed-methods study examines how people discuss and disclose the use of two different drugs-marijuana and heroin-in the popular online forum Reddit. In this study hermeneutic content analysis is employed in order to describe the type of comments people make in forums dedicated to discussions about illicit drugs. With inductive analysis, seven categories of comments were identified: disclosure, instruction and advice, culture, community norms, moralizing, legality, and banter. Our subsequent quantitative analysis indicates that although the amounts of disclosure are similar in each subreddit, there are more instances of instruction and advice in discussions about opiates, and more examples of banter in comments about marijuana use. In fact, both subreddits have high rates of banter. We argue that banter fosters disclosure in both subreddits, and that banter and disclosure are linked with information seeking behaviors in online forums. This work has implications for future explorations of disclosure online and for public health interventions aimed at disseminating credible information about drug use to atrisk individuals.