Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 7, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 18, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 13, 2021
What drives the public interest during the pandemic? An analysis of 9 Wikipedias' most visited medical articles during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the current days of widespread access to the internet, we can monitor populational interest in a topic based on information-targeted web browsing. We provide direct proof of the altered use of medical knowledge from Wikipedia by the global population due to the new SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and related global restrictions.
Objective:
To quantify changes in access to Wikipedia Medicine articles related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
Methods:
We provide a retrospective analysis of medical articles from Wikipedia across 9 languages paired with country-specific statistics of registered deaths due to SARS-CoV-2. We provide Chi2 goodness of fit measures for the forecast model of Wikipedia use trained on data from 2015-2019 and more in-detail analysis concerning specific articles and their clusterization in years prior and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Results:
We observed a significant change in the usage of Wikipedia medical articles in the pandemic period. The increased interest in COVID-related articles correlated with global deaths temporally while presenting a constant correlation with region-specific deaths.
Conclusions:
An analysis of Wikipedias’ medical article popularity could be a successful tool for epidemiologic surveillance. Moreover, it could provide important information about the reasons that trigger public attention and factors that sustain it in the long run.
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.