Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Nov 05, 2021)
Date Submitted: Oct 25, 2019
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Assessing neurosurgical trends in literature and online: a Google Trends, Google Books and PubMed study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Google Books Ngram Viewer (Ngram) is an open online database of 5 million printed books where the frequency of words occurring in books can be analyzed over time. Google Trends is a tool that allows one to gauge popularity of search terms and topics over time. These tools have not yet been used together to assess the historical and current the trends in neurosurgery.
Objective:
To assess the neurosurgical trends in literature and online in the past and currently.
Methods:
Ngram, Google Trends and PubMed data were used to analyze the neurosurgical trends from 2004–2008. Next, Google Trends and PubMed data was obtained from 2018 to compare the data. The following keywords were searched on all three platforms: brain tumor, sciatica, neurosurgery, hydrocephalus and concussion.
Results:
Each platform had a characteristic interest in each topic. Online Google searches were most concerned with sciatica (62/100 worldwide), the scientific community with neurosurgery (7661 average yearly publications) and book authors wrote most about concussions (0.00013% worldwide Google One Million books). Sciatica held both the least scientific publications (129 average yearly publications) and one of the least mentions in printed books (0.000030% worldwide Google One Million books). The online and PubMed interest levels stayed the same from 2004 to 2018. However, concussion—which held one of the lowest online search interests from 2004 to 2008—had a major increase in 2018 online searches.
Conclusions:
Ngram, Google Trends and PubMed data together provide valuable insights into the health interests among physicians and the public. It is crucial for neurosurgeons to be aware of historical trends as they offer vital insight on the driving factors in medicine today. Physicians can use this understanding to better align public and scientific concerns for the future, provide better patient education and raise awareness on issues that might be overlooked by the public.
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.