ArticleAnnals of medicine and surgery (2012)2021
Retrospective review of Google Trends to gauge the popularity of global surgery worldwide: A cross-sectional study.
Article in Annals of medicine and surgery (2012), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Web-Based Educational Resources for Patients with Sickle Cell Disease: Availability and Reliability.International journal of general medicine · 2024Article
- Letter to the Editor: International Survey of Medical Students Exposure to Relevant Global Surgery (ISOMERS): A Cross-Sectional Study.World journal of surgery · 2022Article
- European national health plans and the monitoring of online searches for information on diabetes mellitus in different European healthcare systems.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionGlobal surgery is a growing movement worldwide, but its expansion has not been quantified. Google Search is the most popular search engine worldwide, and Google Trends analyzes its queries to determine popularity trends. We used Google Trends to analyze the regional and temporal popularity of global surgery (GS). Furthermore, we compared GS with global health (GH) to understand if the two were correlated.
methodsThis is a retrospective cross-sectional study examining Google Trends of GS and GH. We searched the terms "global surgery" and "global health" on Google Trends (Google Inc., CA, USA) from January 2004 to May 2021. We identified time trends and compared the two search terms using SPSS v26 (IBM, WA, USA) to run summary descriptive analyses and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests.
resultsThe ten countries most interested in GS were India (5.0%), the United Kingdom (5.0%), Ireland (4.0%), the United States (4.0%), Australia (3.0%), Canada (3.0%), New Zealand (3.0%), Germany (2.0%), South Africa (2.0%), and Nigeria (1.0%). GS became more popular after 2015 (2.3% vs. 1.3%, P < 0.001) and was consistently less popular than GH (1.6% vs. 45.3%, P = 0.04). The difference between GS and GH interest levels increased after 2015 (45.4% vs. 42.9%, P = 0.04).
conclusionGS is less popular than GH, more popular in high-income countries, and has become more popular after 2015 when the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery published its seminal report. The World Health Organization passed resolution WHA 68.15. Future advocacy efforts should target low- and middle-income countries primarily.
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