JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Web-based sources are increasingly employed in the analysis, detection, and forecasting of diseases and epidemics, and in predicting human behavior towards several health topics. This use of the Internet has come to be known as infodemiology; a concept introduced by Gunther Eysenbach. Infodemiology and infoveillance studies use web-based data and have become an integral part of health informatics research over the past decade.

Objective:

The aim of this paper is to provide a scoping review of the state-of-the-art in infodemiology, along with the background and history of the concept, identify sources and health categories and topics, elaborate on the validity of the employed methods, and discuss the gaps identified in current research.

Methods:

The PRISMA guidelines are followed in order to extract the publications that fall under the umbrella of infodemiology and infoveillance from the JMIR, PubMed, and Scopus databases. A total of 338 documents are extracted for assessment.

Results:

The vast majority of the studies, i.e. 83.43% (282/339), are published with JMIR Publications. The “Journal of Medical Internet Research” features almost half of the publications, i.e. 168/338 (49.70%), and “JMIR Public Health and Surveillance” more than one fifth of the examined studies, i.e. 74/338 (21.89%). The interest in the subject is increasing every year, with 2018 featuring more than one fourth of the total publications (26.33%; 89/338), while counting both 2017 and 2018, the publications account for more than half (50.59%; 171/338) of the total number of publications in the last decade. The most popular source is Twitter with 44.97% (152/338), followed by Google with 24.56% (83/338), Websites/Platforms with 13.91% (47/338), Blogs/Forums with 10.06% (34/338), Facebook with 8.88% (30/338), and other search engines with 5.62% (19/338). As for the subject examined, conditions/diseases with 17.16% (58/338) and epidemics/outbreaks with 15.68% (53/338) are the most popular categories identified in this review, followed by health care (11.54%; 39/338), drugs (10.36%; 40/338), and smoking/alcohol (8.58%; 29/338).

Conclusions:

The field of infodemiology is becoming increasingly popular, employing innovating methods and approaches for health assessment. The use of Web-based sources that provide us with information that would not be accessible otherwise and also tackle the issues arising from the time-consuming traditional methods, shows that infodemiology plays a very important role in health informatics research.