Infodemiology and Infoveillance
Infodemiology (Eysenbach 2002, Eysenbach 2006, Eysenbach 2009) has been defined as "the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. Infodemiology data can be collected and analyzed in near real time. Examples for infodemiology applications include: the analysis of queries from Internet search engines to predict disease outbreaks (eg. influenza); monitoring peoples' status updates on microblogs such as Twitter for syndromic surveillance; detecting and quantifying disparities in health information availability; identifying, defining, assessing and monitoring the "quality" of public health relevant publications on the Internet (eg. anti-vaccination sites, but also news articles or expert-curated outbreak reports); automated tools to measure information diffusion and knowledge translation, and tracking the effectiveness of health marketing campaigns e.g. by measuring how they resonate in social media or mass media outlets. Moreover, analyzing how people search and navigate the Internet for health-related information, as well as how they communicate and share this information, can provide valuable insights into health-related behavior of populations. " (Eysenbach 2009)
More recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an “infodemic” on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, and recognized the importance of infodemiology as a key method in fighting the infodemic. The seminal WHO papers on this topic were published in JMIR journals (e.g. Tangcharoensathien et al. 2020; Calleja et al. 2021).
See also related E-Collections:
Infoveillance, Infodemiology and Digital Disease Surveillance
Infoveillance and Social Listening
