The rise of infodemiology and infoveillance during COVID-19 crisis

Steffen Springer; Michael Zieger; Artur Strzelecki

doi:10.1016/j.onehlt.2021.100288

The rise of infodemiology and infoveillance during COVID-19 crisis

One Health. 2021 Jul 3:13:100288. doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2021.100288. eCollection 2021 Dec.

Authors

Steffen Springer¹, Michael Zieger¹, Artur Strzelecki²

Affiliations

¹ SRH Wald-Klinikum Gera, Straße des Friedens 122, D-07548 Gera, Germany.
² Department of Informatics, University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice 40-287, 1 Maja 50, Poland.

Abstract

We noticed an increase in the relative number of published papers on topics such as infoveillance, infodemiology and Google Trends. Collected PubMed data are from the period of January 2020 to March 2021 and were searched with the use of five keywords: infoveillance, infodemiology, Google Trends, diabetes and in silico. We compared an increase in the number of papers from PubMed with search interest expressed in Google Trends. Collected Google Trends data is from the same period, covering fifteen months starting January 2020 and were searched with the use of three search topics: coronavirus, lockdown and social distancing. The geographic setting for search engine users was worldwide. We propose a hypothesis that after increased interest in searches during the pandemic's initial months came an increased number of published papers on topics such as infoveillance, infodemiology and Google Trends.

Keywords: COVID-19; Google trends; Search engine data.