Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Dermatology
Date Submitted: May 16, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 26, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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 YouTube as an Educational Tool for Shingles: Cross-Sectional Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
YouTube is a popular platform with many videos which have potential educational value for medical students. Due to the lack of peer review, other surrogates are necessary to determine the content quality of such educational videos. Few studies have analyzed the research background of the physicians associated with the production of YouTube videos for medical education. The research background of those physicians may be a reflection of the content quality of these educational videos.
Objective:
This study identifies physicians associated with the production of educational YouTube videos about shingles and analyzes the physicians based on their research background.
Methods:
Using the YouTube search engine with default settings, the term “shingles” was searched on May 8, 2020. A cross-sectional study was performed using the first 50 search results. A search on Scopus for each identified physician was performed and data regarding their research background was recorded.
Results:
Of the 50 YouTube videos, 35 (70%) were categorized as academic. From the academic videos, 24 (71%) featured physicians totaling 25 physicians overall. Five physicians (20%) had at least 1 shingles-related publication. Eight physicians (32%) had an h-index >10. Twenty-one physicians (84%) held an academic affiliation.
Conclusions:
These results ensure to a certain degree the quality of the content in academic videos on YouTube for medical education. However, more evaluation is needed for this growing platform.
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.