Twelve-Year Analysis of Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting’s Official Hashtag

Abstract

Twitter, among other social media platforms, has become more popular over time. Social media platforms underpin the way scholars share ideas, propagate the latest emergence of evidence, and adopt new practices, by providing a virtual platform for interacting, socializing, and sharing information from academic conferences with the outside world beyond the physical location. The Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting (TRBAM) is the largest annual conference for transportation engineering and science, and the hashtag for the conference, #TRBAM, was used first in 2009. This paper aims to perform an observational study based on the interactions on Twitter surrounding this hashtag by collecting all original #TRBAM tweets for 12 years (2009–2020). A general trend in the data is that the quantitative measures (tweets, retweets, and favorites) are all much higher during the conference month compared with other months. Top trending topics included: transit, safety, bike or non-motorized mode of transportation, data, and freight. Overall, the communication pattern shows more dispersion than the central tendency. The findings of this study highlight the need to implement and improve strategies to help transportation research communities encourage continuous and active participation during and after conferences. More active engagement among attendees will help maintain the momentum of information sharing and expand the traffic safety platform globally.