Developing a rule-based method for identifying researchers on Twitter: The case of vaccine discussions

This study seeks to develop a method for identifying the occurrences and proportions of researchers, media and other professionals active in Twitter discussions. As a case example, an anonymised dataset from Twitter vaccine discussions is used. The study proposes a method of using keywords as strings within lists to identify classes from user biographies. This provides a way to apply multiple classification principles to a set of Twitter biographies using semantic rules through the Python programming language. The script used for the study is here deposited. Method development for Twitter biography classification concerning occurrences of academics, academically related groups and individuals, media, other groups and members of the general public. Written in the Python programming language.