Hotspots of public concerns about human papillomavirus vaccine: an analysis based on Sina Weibo

  Objective  To explore the public′s concerns about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine on Weibo for developing strategies to improve social media-based health education on the promotion of HPV vaccination.

  Methods  With hashtags of #hpv# and # cervical cancer vaccine #, we retrieved 27 715 pieces of information released on Sina Weibo between March 1, 2018 and March 1, 2019 using web crawler technology. The information with high-attention were encoded and analyzed, and those with low-attention were modeled using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic.

  Results  A small burst period in time distribution of the information was observed. Hot topics of the high-attention information were classified into popular science, pure marketing, news and policies, consulting and sharing, and forwarding; the implied topics of the information included region and agency, HPV infection and prevention, type and efficacy of HPV vaccines, vaccine reservation and marketing, side effects and adverse reactions HPV vaccinations.

  Conclusion  Relevant departments should make rational use of the information with topics concerned by the public to improve the quality of social media information service.