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

Hyo-Jung Oh; Jae-Gyu Jeon

doi:10.11149/jkaoh.2017.41.2.154

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

Original Article

Journal of Korean Academy of Oral Health 2017; 41(2): 154-161.

Published online: 30 June 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11149/jkaoh.2017.41.2.154

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

Hyo-Jung Oh^1,³, Jae-Gyu Jeon^2,³

¹Graduate School of Archives and Records Management, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea.

²Department of Preventive Dentistry, School of Dentistry, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea.

³Institute of Medical Information Convergence Research in CBNU, Jeonju, Korea.

Corresponding Author: Jae-Gyu Jeon. Department of Preventive Dentistry, School of Dentistry, Chonbuk National university, 567 Baekje-daero, Jeonju 54896, Korea. Tel: +82-63-270-4034, Fax: +82-63-270-4036, dentjjk@jbnu.ac.kr

Received 13 April 2017 Revised 7 May 2017 Accepted 29 May 2017

(open-access):

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 unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.

Keywords: Parabens, Recognition, Toothpastes, Twitter

Figures and Tables

Fig. 1

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

Fig. 2

An example of tweets in twitte.r

Fig. 3

Extraction of key words from mention in tweets.

Fig. 4

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

Table 1

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

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

Table 2

Issue tweets related to parabens

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

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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