Tweet me: conferencing in the era of COVID-19 and 280 characters

Abstract

The ERA-EDTA Social Media team (SoMeT) provides twitter coverage of the annual congress. During the COVID-19 pandemic, #ERAEDTA20 was the first major nephrology congress to be delivered virtually. The effect of The SoMeT and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has not previously been explored. Tweets of the ERA-EDTA congresses 2016-2020, using official hashtags, were evaluated. Metadata of each tweet was collected prospectively; original tweets, retweets and evidence-based tweets were identified. The gender of tweet author and location of twitter activity were established. Network maps were created to ascertain the degree of polarization between the 2019 and 2020 twitter activity, using Gephi 0.9.2. Between 2016 and 2019, the total number of tweets and number of tweet authors increased as did the proportion of female authors (20% vs 27%). In 2019, there were fewer multimedia and evidence based tweets; 8% vs 20% in 2016. Globally, there were fewer nephrology conferences in 2020 and number of tweets per day reduced by 53% from 2019. In 2020, The ERA-EDTA congress saw an increase in authors of 9% and only an 8% reduction in tweets. It was easier to disseminate information, in 2020, measured by increased correlation coefficient (0.14 vs 0.12in 2019). A higher proportion of countries were represented (n = 55 vs n = 48 in 2019) and a higher proportion of tweets came from women. In conclusion, the introduction of SoMeT was associated with increased usage of twitter and ease of information dissemination. Compared with #nephtwitter activity as a whole in 2020, SoMeT has mitigated some of the pandemic deleterious effects in scientific dissemination, relevant to Nephrology.

Rights

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ERA-EDTA. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/ckj/sfab075

Repository URI

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/238177/