ArticleInternational journal of environmental research and public health2019
The Validity of Google Trends Search Volumes for Behavioral Forecasting of National Suicide Rates in Ireland.
Article in International journal of environmental research and public health, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Suicide, self-harm and thoughts of suicide or self-harm in infectious disease epidemics: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2021Pooled it
- Article
- Temporal relationship of suicide-related internet searches and suicide rates in Korea: A prewhitened cross-correlation analysis.PloS one · 2026Article
- Epidemiological trends and determinants of suicide in Iran with insights into the COVID-19 period, 1980-2021.Population health metrics · 2025Article
- Rethinking suicide related searches and their association with suicide rates, attempts, and self harm hospitalisation.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Promises and Pitfalls of Internet Search Data in Mental Health: Critical Review.JMIR mental health · 2025Review
- Creating an Empirical Dermatology Dataset Through Crowdsourcing With Web Search Advertisements.JAMA network open · 2024Observational
- Association Between School-Related Google Trends Search Volume and Suicides Among Children and Adolescents in Japan During 2016-2020: Retrospective Observational Study With a Time-Series Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Observational
- "How" web searches change under stress.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Seasonal Trends in Suicide Attempts-Keywords Related Searches: A Google Trends Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Suicide prevention-related Google searches and subsequent emergency department visits in California and Arizona, 2007-2015.SSM. Mental health · 2024Article
- Predicting state level suicide fatalities in the united states with realtime data and machine learning.Npj mental health research · 2024Article
- Estimating national and state-level suicide deaths using a novel online symptom search data source.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Article
- Article
- Association Between Internet Searches Related to Suicide/Self-harm and Adolescent Suicide Death in South Korea in 2016-2020: Secondary Data Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding: Implications for biodiversity and human-nature interaction.PloS one · 2023Article
- Korean adolescent suicide and search volume for "self-injury" on internet search engines.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Sodium Nitrite Intoxication and Death: Summarizing Evidence to Facilitate Diagnosis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Review
- An evaluation of Internet searches as a marker of trends in population mental health in the US.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Trends of Internet Search Volumes for Major Depressive Disorder Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Korea: An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis.Journal of Korean medical science · 2022Article
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9 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Annual suicide figures are critical in identifying trends and guiding research, yet challenges arising from significant lags in reporting can delay and complicate real-time interventions. In this paper, we utilized Google Trends search volumes for behavioral forecasting of national suicide rates in Ireland between 2004 and 2015. Official suicide rates are recorded by the Central Statistics Office in Ireland. While similar investigations using Google trends data have been carried out in other jurisdictions (e.g., United Kingdom, United Stated of America), such research had not yet been completed in Ireland. We compiled a collection of suicide- and depression-related search terms suggested by Google Trends and manually sourced from the literature. Monthly search rate terms at different lags were compared with suicide occurrences to determine the degree of correlation. Following two approaches based on vector autoregression and neural network autoregression, we achieved mean absolute error values between 4.14 and 9.61 when incorporating search query data, with the highest performance for the neural network approach. The application of this process to United Kingdom suicide and search query data showed similar results, supporting the benefit of Google Trends, neural network approach, and the applied search terms to forecast suicide risk increase. Overall, the combination of societal data and online behavior provide a good indication of societal risks; building on past research, our improvements led to robust models integrating search query and unemployment data for suicide risk forecasting in Ireland.
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