SMFA SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLKIT HOW TO
SMFA SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLKIT SOFTWARE
SMFA SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLKIT CODE

We originally wanted to use other researcher’s tools and surprisingly we found very little code available with the majority outdated and non-functioning. The need for a toolkit like SMMT arose from our work using Twitter data for the characterization of disease transmission during natural disasters and mining large-scale repositories for drug usage related tweets for pharmacovigilance purposes. In an attempt to shift the biomedical community into better practices for research transparency and reproducibility, we introduce the Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT), a suite of tools aimed to encapsulate the cumbersome details of acquiring, preprocessing, annotating, and standardizing social media data.

When it comes to using Twitter data for drug identification and pharmacovigilance tasks, authors of works like have been consistently releasing publicly available datasets, software tools, and complete Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems with their works.

Additionally, the data acquisition methodology is different on each study and seldomly reported, a crucial step towards reproducibility of any of their analyses. While all the listed studies use data from Twitter and Reddit, we can only find code available for one of them. These works encompass countless applications, such as the usage of opioids, the flu, eating disorder networks analyses, depression symptoms detection, and diabetes interventions, etc. Only in the last six years, there has been a great influx of research works that describe different types of research works using Twitter and Reddit data, nearly 2,500 papers are found in PubMed. By using a standard toolkit, researchers will be able to acquire, use, and release data in a consistent way that is transparent for everybody using the toolkit, hence, simplifying research reproducibility and accessibility in the social media domain. The purpose of our toolkit is for researchers to focus on answering research questions, and not the technical aspects of using social media data. In order to address this pressing issue, we introduce the Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT), a suite of tools aimed to encapsulate the cumbersome details of acquiring, preprocessing, annotating and standardizing social media data.

With minimal exceptions, the few that do, place the burden on the researcher to figure out how to fetch the data, how to best format their data, and how to create automatic and manual annotations on the acquired data. However, the vast majority of those works do not share their code or data for replicating their studies.

In PubMed alone, there have been nearly 2,500 publication entries since 2014 that deal with analyzing social media data from Twitter and Reddit. There has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of utilizing social media data for research purposes within the biomedical community.

SMFA SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLKIT SOFTWARE

SMFA SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLKIT HOW TO

Smfa social media toolkit