Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Nov 23, 2023)
Date Submitted: Oct 4, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: A Systematic Literature Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media sites offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation.
Objective:
The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts.
Methods:
Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health.
Results:
Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies.
Conclusions:
Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.