{"doi":"10.2196/42241","title":"Monitoring and Identifying Emerging e-Cigarette Brands and Flavors on Twitter: Observational Study","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Flavored electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have become very popular in recent years. e-Cigarette users like to share their e-cigarette products and e-cigarette use (vaping) experiences on social media. e-Cigarette marketing and promotions are also prevalent online. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a method to identify new e-cigarette brands and flavors mentioned on Twitter and to monitor e-cigarette brands and flavors mentioned on Twitter from May 2021 to December 2021. METHODS: We collected 1.9 million tweets related to e-cigarettes between May 3, 2021, and December 31, 2021, by using the Twitter streaming application programming interface. Commercial and noncommercial tweets were characterized based on promotion-related keywords. We developed a depletion method to identify new e-cigarette brands by removing the keywords that already existed in the reference data set (Twitter data related to e-cigarettes from May 3, 2021, to August 31, 2021) or our previously identified brand list from the keywords in the target data set (e-cigarette-related Twitter data from September 1, 2021, to December 31, 2021), followed by a manual Google search to identify new e-cigarette brands. To identify new e-cigarette flavors, we constructed a flavor keyword list based on our previously collected e-cigarette flavor names, which were used to identify potential tweet segments that contain at least one of the e-cigarette flavor keywords. Tweets or tweet segments with flavor keywords but not any known flavor names were marked as potential new flavor candidates, which were further verified by a web-based search. The longitudinal trends in the number of tweets mentioning e-cigarette brands and flavors were examined in both commercial and noncommercial tweets. RESULTS: Through our developed methods, we identified 34 new e-cigarette brands and 97 new e-cigarette flavors from commercial tweets as well as 56 new e-cigarette brands and 164 new e-cigarette flavors from noncommercial tweets. The longitudinal trend of the e-cigarette brands showed that JUUL was the most popular e-cigarette brand mentioned on Twitter; however, there was a decreasing trend in the mention of JUUL over time on Twitter. Menthol flavor was the most popular e-cigarette flavor mentioned in the commercial tweets, whereas mango flavor was the most popular e-cigarette flavor mentioned in the noncommercial tweets during our study period. CONCLUSIONS: Our proposed methods can successfully identify new e-cigarette brands and flavors mentioned on Twitter. Twitter data can be used for monitoring the dynamic changes in the popularity of e-cigarette brands and flavors.","journal":"JMIR Formative Research","year":2022,"id":273429,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":11,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9496,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":940867,"name":"Runtao Zhou","orcid":"0000-0002-1745-2148","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":305192,"name":"Zidian Xie","orcid":"0000-0002-5149-7710","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":278344,"name":"Dongmei Li","orcid":"0000-0001-9140-2483","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":940866,"name":"Qihang Tang","orcid":"0000-0002-4875-9732","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":29,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:03.504676Z","pmid":"36469415","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}