Table 3.

Social media involvement leading to new research ideas

Phase/stage	Description	Examples
Idea	Ideas can arise from online dialogues, tweetchats, commentaries, or posted articles	The idea for the paper “The Way to Man’s Heart Is through the Stomach” [46], and the collaboration between colleagues at different institutions, arose from a Twitter conversation. Twitter accounts involved in the original conversation were mentioned in the acknowledgements.
Working groups	Affinities, similar position, spontaneous organization around an idea in a tweet chat	Surgical ergonomics working group spearheaded by @GeetaLalMD following discussions on this topic on live tweets from surgical conferences
Collaborations	Collaborative studies either prospective or retrospective	Prospective: LiverGroup.org; PancreasGroup.org Surveys Retrospective COVIDSurg collaborative [47–51]
Recruitment	Post adverts to recruit sites and patients to studies, and post updates on how recruitment is progressing [52]	Sunflower study
Application	Tweet surveys have known a remarkable popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic	Several Covid-19 surveys [53, 54]
Journal selection	Different policies on Twitter	Ex. BJS—since 2014
Dissemination	Conference live-tweets, online congresses	Surgical conferences with monitored Twitter activity [55–59]
Innovative formats	Specific interactions around ideas or research limited to the use of a SoMe platform	#HPBdailyRead, shared HPB-specific info on a hashtag for followers