The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. during the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its millions of users to send and read each other's “tweets,” or short, 140-character messages. The service has more than 190 million registered users and processes about 55 million tweets per day. Useful information about news and geopolitical events lies embedded in the Twitter stream, which embodies, in the aggregate, Twitter users' perspectives and reactions to current events. By virtue of sheer volume, content embedded in the Twitter stream may be useful for tracking or even forecasting behavior if it can be extracted in an efficient manner. In this study, we examine the use of information embedded in the Twitter stream to (1) track rapidly-evolving public sentiment with respect to H1N1 or swine flu, and (2) track and measure actual disease activity. We also show that Twitter can be used as a measure of public interest or concern about health-related events. Our results show that estimates of influenza-like illness derived from Twitter chatter accurately track reported disease levels

Product and process innovation in manufacturing firms: a 30-year bibliometric analysis

Built upon a thirty-year dataset collected from the Web of Science database, the present research aims to offer a comprehensive overview of papers, authors, streams of research, and the most influential journals that discuss product and process innovation in the manufacturing environment. The dataset is composed of 418 papers from more than 150 journals from the period between 1985 and 2015. Homogeneity analysis by means of alternating least squares (HOMALS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) are used to accomplish the objectives listed above through the keywords given by authors. Initially, the paper highlights and discusses the similarity between the topics debated by the main journals in this field. Subsequently, a wide-range map of topics is presented highlighting five main areas of interests; namely, performance, patent, small firm, product development, and organization. A SNA is also performed in order to validate the results that emerged from HOMALS. Finally, several insights about future research avenues in the manufacturing field are provided