ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2015
Is There a Weekly Pattern for Health Searches on Wikipedia and Is the Pattern Unique to Health Topics?
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Urban cycling-specific active transportation behaviour is sensitive to the fresh start effect: triangulating observational evidence from real world data.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Article
- New year as a moment of change in pro-environmental product consumption: evaluating the habit discontinuity and self-activation hypotheses using a large UK retail dataset.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- What's hot and what's not in lay psychology: Wikipedia's most-viewed articles.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Formative evaluation of a portion control and calorie reduction campaign: Insights from focus groups with target audience.Preventive medicine reports · 2021Article
- Correlation between flu and Wikipedia's pages visualization.Acta bio-medica : Atenei Parmensis · 2021Article
- Impact of Illness on Electronic Health Use (The Seventh Tromsø Study - Part 2): Population-Based Questionnaire Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- Diabetes on Twitter: A Sentiment Analysis.Journal of diabetes science and technology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundOnline health information-seeking behaviors have been reported to be more common at the beginning of the workweek. This behavior pattern has been interpreted as a kind of "healthy new start" or "fresh start" due to regrets or attempts to compensate for unhealthy behavior or poor choices made during the weekend. However, the observations regarding the most common health information-seeking day were based only on the analyses of users' behaviors with websites on health or on online health-related searches. We wanted to confirm if this pattern could be found in searches of Wikipedia on health-related topics and also if this search pattern was unique to health-related topics or if it could represent a more general pattern of online information searching--which could be of relevance even beyond the health sector.
objectiveThe aim was to examine the degree to which the search pattern described previously was specific to health-related information seeking or whether similar patterns could be found in other types of information-seeking behavior.
methodsWe extracted the number of searches performed on Wikipedia in the Norwegian language for 911 days for the most common sexually transmitted diseases (chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], and acquired immune deficiency syndrome [AIDS]), other health-related topics (influenza, diabetes, and menopause), and 2 nonhealth-related topics (footballer Lionel Messi and pop singer Justin Bieber). The search dates were classified according to the day of the week and ANOVA tests were used to compare the average number of hits per day of the week.
resultsThe ANOVA tests showed that the sexually transmitted disease queries had their highest peaks on Tuesdays (P<.001) and the fewest searches on Saturdays. The other health topics also showed a weekly pattern, with the highest peaks early in the week and lower numbers on Saturdays (P<.001). Footballer Lionel Messi had the highest mean number of hits on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, whereas pop singer Justin Bieber had the most hits on Tuesdays. Both these tracked search queries also showed significantly lower numbers on Saturdays (P<.001).
conclusionsOur study supports prior studies finding an increase in health information searching at the beginning of the workweek. However, we also found a similar pattern for 2 randomly chosen nonhealth-related terms, which may suggest that the search pattern is not unique to health-related searches. The results are potentially relevant beyond the field of health and our preliminary findings need to be further explored in future studies involving a broader range of nonhealth-related searches.
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