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Twitter verse of Resuscitation 2015 – The Guidelines Congress

Purpose of the study: Medical conferences on resuscitation enable exchange of scientific information, knowledge, and discussion on research results. Popularity of communication via modern emerging technologies is building up and growing rapidly among conference attendees. Today, Twitter has proven to be a potent mechanism for disseminating educational information in different medical fields. However, there prevails a sparseness of data illustrating Twitter activity regarding European Resuscitation Council (ERC) conferences. The aim of our study was to identify tweets and re-tweets about Resuscitation 2015 – The Guidelines Congress (Resus2015). Materials and methods: Prior to Resus2015 the hashtag #erc15prague was registered within Symplur. People were encouraged to include #erc15prague in every conference related tweet. On 9th November 2015, using the ‘TwitteR’ package, we obtained a database containing every tweet produced between 28th of October and 1st of November with #erc15prague. Results: For the time period, there were a total of 2149 #erc15prague tweets.Onethird of them (33%) were original tweets, while 67% (n = 1435) were re-tweets. We identified 451 different Twitter user accounts from which #erc15prague tweets were posted. The difference between the median and mean number of #erc15prague per Twitter user (1 and 4.7, respectively) indicates majority of #erc15prague tweets originates from a relatively small number of contributors. Twitter users network at Resus2015 is shown in Fig. 1. Conclusions: This is the first study identifying tweets and retweets about ERC conference. Although we have demonstrated a colourful tweeting and re- tweeting activity about Resus2015, majority of #erc15prague tweets originated from small number of Twitter users. Nevertheless, they were greatly re-tweeted, indicating a substantial impact on the Twitter users’ virtual network. In future studies we recommend further analysis of Twitter users actively tweeting and re-tweeting about ERC conferences, separating those physically present, compared to those tweeting away from the conference.

Twitter, network, conference, attendees, tweets, re-tweets

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