How do Twitter, Wikipedia, and Harrison's principles of medicine describe heart attacks?

Abstract

Social media, such as Wikipedia and Twitter, are an increasingly common source of medical information, including for medical students. It is unknown how medical information in social media compares to medical information in medical textbooks. Here we compare Wikipedia articles on heart attacks and palpitations and tweets mentioning heart attacks and palpitations to chapters from Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine and Braunwald's Heart Disease on myocardial infarction and cardiac dysrhythmias. For heart attacks, the chapters from Harrison's had higher Jaccard similarity to Wikipedia than Braunwald's or Twitter. For palpitations, no pair of sources had a higher Jaccard (token) similarity than any other pair. For no source was the Jaccard (token) similarity attributable to semantic similarity. This suggests that technical and popular sources of medical information focus on different aspects of medicine, rather than one describing a simplified version of the other. We hope our work motivates further investigation into the representation of medical knowledge in different media.