Longitudinal analysis of behavioral factors and techniques used to identify vaccine hesitancy among Twitter users: Scoping review

While vaccines have played a pivotal role in the fight against infectious diseases, individuals engage in online resources to find vaccine-related support and information. The benefits and consequences of these online peers are unclear and mainly cause a behavioral shift in user sentiment toward vaccination. This scoping review aims to identify the community and individual factors that longitudinally influence public behavior toward vaccination. The secondary aim is to gain insight into techniques and methodologies used to extract these factors from Twitter data. We followed PRISMA-ScR guidelines to search various online repositories. From this search process, a total of 28 most relevant articles out of 705 relevant studies. Three main themes emerged including individual and community factors influencing public attitude toward vaccination, and techniques employed to identify these factors. Anti-vax, Pro-vax, and neutral are the major communities, while misinformation, vaccine campaign, and user demographics are the common individual factors assessed during this reviewing process. Twitter user sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral) and emotions (fear, trust, sadness) were also discussed to identify the intentions to accept or refuse vaccines. SVM, LDA, BERT are the techniques used for topic modeling, while Louvain, NodeXL, and Infomap algorithms are used for community detection. This research is notable for being the first systematic review that emphasizes the dearth of longitudinal studies and the methodological and underlying practical constraints underpinning the lucrative implementation of an explainable and longitudinal behavior analysis system. Moreover, new possible research directions are suggested for the researchers to perform accurate human behavior analysis.