Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 23, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 23, 2024 - Sep 17, 2024
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Quantifying public engagement with science and malinformation on COVID-19 vaccines: Cross-Sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Medical journals are critical vanguards of research, and there is increased public interest in and engagement with medico-scientific findings. How findings propagate and are understood, and what harms erroneous claims might cause to public health remain unclear.
Objective:
To gauge the engagement of the public with medical science and quantify the propagation patterns of medico-scientific articles.
Methods:
Altmetric analysis of engagement with a decade of approximately 9.8 million articles from five leading medical journals. Comparative analysis with the proliferation of and sentiment of the article with the highest-ever Altmetric score, containing vaccine-negative malinformation in social media users and media outlets worldwide.
Results:
Potential scientific malinformation was much more likely to be engaged with and amplified by vaccine-negative twitter accounts than neutral ones (p < 0.00001), with negative editorialization alluding to the ostensible prestige of medical journals. Malinformation was invoked frequently invoked by conspiracy theory websites and non-news sources (39.2% of all citations) online to cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccination, who tended to use that information repeatedly.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest growing public interest in medical science and presents evidence that medical and scientific journals need be aware of the harms of potential misinformation and malinformation. Clinical Trial: NA
Citation
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Copyright
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