Journal List > J Korean Acad Oral Health > v.41(2) > 1057730

Oh and Jeon: Changes in public recognition of parabens on twitter and the research status of parabens related to toothpaste

Abstract

Objectives

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in public recognition of parabens on Twitter and the research status of parabens related to toothpaste.

Methods

Tweet information between 2010 and October 2016 was collected by an automatic web crawler and examined according to tweet frequency, key words (2012-October 2016), and issue tweet detection analyses to reveal changes in public recognition of parabens on Twitter. To investigate the research status of parabens related to toothpaste, queries such as “paraben,” “paraben and toxicity,” “paraben and (toothpastes or dentifrices),” and “paraben and (toothpastes or dentifrices) and toxicity” were used.

Results

The number of tweets concerning parabens sharply increased when parabens in toothpaste emerged as a social issue (October 2014), and decreased from 2015 onward. However, toothpaste and its related terms were continuously included in the core key words extracted from tweets from 2015. They were not included in key words before 2014, indicating that the emergence of parabens in toothpaste as a social issue plays an important role in public recognition of parabens in toothpaste. The issue tweet analysis also confirmed the change in public recognition of parabens in toothpaste. Despite the expansion of public recognition of parabens in toothpaste, there are only seven research articles on the topic in PubMed.

Conclusions

The general public clearly recognized parabens in toothpaste after emergence of parabens in toothpaste as a social issue. Nevertheless, the scientific information on parabens in toothpaste is very limited, suggesting that the efforts of dental scientists are required to expand scientific knowledge related to parabens in oral hygiene measures.

Figures and Tables

Fig. 1

A model for analysis on public recognition on parabens in twitter.

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Fig. 2

An example of tweets in twitte.r

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Fig. 3

Extraction of key words from mention in tweets.

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Fig. 4

Changes over time in the number of tweets erlated to parabens.

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Table 1

Changes over time in frequency ranking of key words in tweets related to parabens

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The boxes shaded grey represent key words related to oral hygiene measures.

Table 2

Issue tweets related to parabens

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The boxes shaded grey represent issue topic tweets generated after parabens in toothpastes became a social issue. The ranking is based on tweet importance.

Table 3

The number of articles related to parabens in PubMed during the years 1945-2016

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Notes

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2016R1A2B4006378 and 2016R1A2B1008000).

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