ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2021
Assessing Public Interest Based on Wikipedia's Most Visited Medical Articles During the SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak: Search Trends Analysis.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Persistently increased frequency of diabetic ketoacidosis in new-onset type 1 diabetes in Polish children: nationwide analysis 2019-2022.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2026Article
- Changes in Reproductive Health Information-Seeking Behaviors After the Dobbs Decision: Systematic Search of the Wikimedia Database.JMIR infodemiology · 2024Article
- What's hot and what's not in lay psychology: Wikipedia's most-viewed articles.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Readability of English, German, and Russian Disease-Related Wikipedia Pages: Automated Computational Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Searching for HIV and AIDS Health Information in South Africa, 2004-2019: Analysis of Google and Wikipedia Search Trends.JMIR formative research · 2022Article
- Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.GigaScience · 2022Article
- Resilience and Anxiety Among Healthcare Workers During the Spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant: A Moderated Mediation Model.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Undergraduate Students' Online Health Information-Seeking Behavior during the COVID-19 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn the current era of widespread access to the internet, we can monitor public interest in a topic via information-targeted web browsing. We sought to provide direct proof of the global population's altered use of Wikipedia medical knowledge resulting from the new COVID-19 pandemic and related global restrictions.
objectiveWe aimed to identify temporal search trends and quantify changes in access to Wikipedia Medicine Project articles that were related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsWe performed a retrospective analysis of medical articles across nine language versions of Wikipedia and country-specific statistics for registered COVID-19 deaths. The observed patterns were compared to a forecast model of Wikipedia use, which was trained on data from 2015 to 2019. The model comprehensively analyzed specific articles and similarities between access count data from before (ie, several years prior) and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wikipedia articles that were linked to those directly associated with the pandemic were evaluated in terms of degrees of separation and analyzed to identify similarities in access counts. We assessed the correlation between article access counts and the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases and deaths to identify factors that drove interest in these articles and shifts in public interest during the subsequent phases of the pandemic.
resultsWe observed a significant (P<.001) increase in the number of entries on Wikipedia medical articles during the pandemic period. The increased interest in COVID-19-related articles temporally correlated with the number of global COVID-19 deaths and consistently correlated with the number of region-specific COVID-19 deaths. Articles with low degrees of separation were significantly similar (P<.001) in terms of access patterns that were indicative of information-seeking patterns.
conclusionsThe analysis of Wikipedia medical article popularity could be a viable method for epidemiologic surveillance, as it provides important information about the reasons behind public attention and factors that sustain public interest in the long term. Moreover, Wikipedia users can potentially be directed to credible and valuable information sources that are linked with the most prominent articles.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.