Social Media Analytics for Smart Health

Abbasi, A., Adjeroh, D., Dredze, M., Paul, M. J., Zahedi, F. M., Zhao, H., Ross, A. (2014). Social Media Analytics for Smart Health. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 29(2), 60—80. doi:10.1109/MIS.2014.29

Summary

People increasingly use social media for obtaining health-related information. Abbasi and Adjeroh discuss the following five dimensions to judge a medium's importance as an information provider:

1. credibility; an analysis of health-related website which used data taken from third-party health URL databases showed that credible sites are closely connected, while less-credible sites are dispersed across various clusters.
2. recency was measured with time series data on product recalls, ongoing reviews, and drug safety communications which showed that for roughly 35% of the events social media was providing leading signals, contrasted to lagging signals for 50% of the observed events.
3. uniqueness indicated that especially leading signals obtained from social media are often unique,
4. frequency which is in general inversely proportional to salience, and
5. salience, indicating the extend to which a topic is discussed.