Thread by @cfiesler

We read 700+ Reddit papers, analysis described in this (open access!) @SocialMedia_Soc article (led by @moduloone, with @_sgilbert_ @NaiyanJones & @michaelzimmer). Here are some things we know about research that uses data from Reddit! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Unsurprisingly, Reddit as a site of study or data source is on the rise. The first 2 papers we encountered were published in 2010, with a jump to 17 in 2013, and 230 in 2019.

I also think it's really interesting that though computing and related disciplines make up the largest number of journals represented in our dataset of Reddit papers, medicine and health is next - even (just) above social science.

But WHAT is actually being studied so much on Reddit related to health? The answer seems to be mental health, which is the top keyword above the obvious ones, right above machine learning (and there's definitely some overlap there); depression also appears in the top 20 keywords.

We also see r/depression as the most studied subreddit just below news-related subreddits and the popular r/AskReddit. r/depression, r/SuicideWatch, r/anxiety, r/bipolarreddit and r/opiates also appear in the top 20.

We also did some very high-level of analysis of ethics-related aspects in these 700+ Reddit papers. Some highlights:
- IRB or other review is rarely mentioned, nor is consent
- 28.5% used direct quotes, 2.4% paraphrased & 9.4% included usernames
- 7.4% mentioned sharing datasets

We also looked to see whether research was being shared back to the Reddit community - i.e., whether there were mentions of these papers anywhere on Reddit. Interestingly, almost 30% were, but rarely FROM the researchers or TO the subreddit where data was collected from.

Given the finding from @moduloone and I (in this OTHER @SocialMedia_Soc paper (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…) that suggested that most Twitter users would want to READ a paper that includes their tweets as data - I actually suspect this would be even stronger on Reddit.

Anyway, there is far more detail in this exceedingly descriptive paper, with a handful of implications and thoughts from us at the end. And you probably won't be surprised to hear that we're digging much more closely into the research ethics side now. :)