ArticleFrontiers in public health2022
Understanding the Inequality of Web Traffic and Engagement in Online Healthcare Communities.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gender Inclusivity and Exclusivity in US Hospitals' Online Obstetrics, Labor and Delivery, and Pregnancy-Related Resources: Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Observational
- The Effect of Offline Medical Resource Distribution on Online Physician-Patient Interaction: Empirical Study With Online and Offline Data.JMIR formative research · 2023Article
- How the use of an online healthcare community affects the doctor-patient relationship: An empirical study in China.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Understanding Physicians' Motivation to Provide Healthcare Service Online in the Digital Age.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Is physician online information sharing always beneficial to patient education? An attention perspective.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- The impact of online health community engagement on lifestyle changes: A serially mediated model.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The online healthcare community (OHC) is a kind of doctor-patient communication platform, in which doctors can share medical knowledge and provide various kinds of counsel for patients. However, if the OHC's web traffic is concentrated on a small number of doctors, or if only a few doctors are actively involved in the OHC's activities, this will not be conducive to the optimal development of the OHC. This study explores this issue of inequality and makes three main innovations. First, based on data on web traffic and engagement extracted from 139,037 doctors' web pages in one popular OHC, we point out how serious the inequality phenomenon is. Second, we confirm that the Matthew effect indeed exists in this context and leads to greater inequality. Third, we demonstrate that the inequality of psychological or material rewards causes the inequality of web traffic or engagement to become worse; hence, an appropriate reward mechanism should be designed to mitigate the Matthew effect rather than enhance it. Finally, we discuss the managerial implications of these results, as well as avenues for future studies.
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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.