Dermatology Online Journal

Doximity, currently the largest online social networking service for United States (US) health care professionals and medical students, provides a wide variety of content to a large audience. In fact, its database includes 1,078,305 physicians in the US. It is therefore important to evaluate this content from time to time. Our objective is to analyze both the residency rankings and news content presented in Doximity, with respect to dermatology. The study compared the residency rankings created by Doximity to another dermatology residency ranking system that used a different algorithm. In terms of dermatology content, seven dermatology-related search terms were entered into the Doximity search query and data was collected on the first 20 “relevant” articles. Our study evaluated a total of 140 articles. The search term “skin cancer” yielded the most articles totaling 6,001. Informative articles were the most common type of article for each content item searched except for “dermatology”, yielding research articles as the most common content type (70%). The search term “melanoma awareness” had the largest number of shares (19,032). In comparing dermatology residency rankings on Doximity with another ranking system that accounted for scholarly achievement, there was 50% overlap. In conclusion, it is vital to evaluate content on social media websites that are utilized by US medical students and health care professionals. We hope this information presented provides an up-to-date analysis on the quality of one particular social media platform.