I like Twitter. Can you tell?

I’ve been getting lots of feedback about my series on Twitter for Scientists, but the most common questions I get are “Where do I start and who should I follow?”

Well, the short answer is that you can start anytime you want, and follow whoever you find interesting.

But then I thought about it more, and, through discussion with Jeremy at RadarLake and Sara Johnson realized that we don’t have an “Epidemiology” hashtag. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a really useful thing would be to have a list of Epid-related hashtags and one unifying epidemiology hashtag.

PSA: If you’re going to tweet about epidemiology in any capacity, please use the #EPID hashtag. It’ll make it easier for us all to keep in touch, and it’ll help promote epidemiology.

I’m going to be curating a list of Epidemiology-related hashtags here to try and provide people with a jumping off point with Twitter. It will also help people network with others interested in their area and hopefully spur discussion. This is by no means exhaustive, so if you have any ideas or ones I’ve missed, please let me know either by email or in the comments.

Hashtags after the jump.

I’m starting with the ones below, but will add to it as I get more suggestions.

Special thanks to (soon to be Dr) Ashley Miller, and Health_Data for their input.

Update: 25/4/12 – added #icanhazpdf

The More You Know
The More You Know!

General Tags

#Epid: The main Epidemiology hashtag. Please spread the word, and start using this so people realize that we’re not skin doctors.

#SDOH: Social determinants of health. Aspects of the environment and behaviours that impact our health.

#PHealth: A public health hashtag

#icanhazpdf: The seedy underbelly of academia, where you can request access to papers from journals that your institution doesn’t subscribe to. I use this one a fair bit. Inspired by icanhazcheezburger

ADDED 12/06/13 #globalhealth: Information relating to global health concerns and issues.

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Higher Education and Graduate School

#highered: For general higher ed discussions

#gradschool: Conversations about the graduate student experience

#PhDchat: As above, but more PhD centric

#MPHStudents: Proposed by Lucy W, this is for MPH students to network

#MedEd: Discussions about the medical school education system

#CDNPse: Canadian Post Secondary Education

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Science Blogging

#Scienceblogging: Used for science related blog posts

#Sciam: Blog posts from the Scientific American network

#Scienceblogs: Blog posts from the Science Blogs network

#scicomm: Science communication – blogging, working with reporters. This is where it all goes!

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Infectious Disease Epidemiology

#vaxfax: This is used for vaccine-related tweets

#sciencemob: An anti-vaccine person made the comment that scientists were like an angry mob. Thus, this tag was born.

#pathogenposse: This hashtag follows virus outbreaks and is focused on infectious disease epi

#teamhygiene: Used by people who are being hygeinic (sample tweet: “Teeth brushin time!”)

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Public Health, Health Promotion and Prevention

#publichealth: Self explanatory; used primarily by MPH programs and schools

#prevention: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and this hashtag reiterates that!

#healthpromotion: Self explanatory; used for health promotion tweets

#nutrition: Nutrition and nom related information is all here.

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So this is all I have right now – if you have any others, please let me know and I’ll be sure to add them to the list!