Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet

By Gunther Eysenbach. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2009

1,202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Infodemiology can be 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 and monitoring 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. 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. Seven years after the infodemiology concept was first introduced, this paper revisits the emerging fields of infodemiology and infoveillance and proposes an expanded framework, introducing some basic metrics such as information prevalence, concept occurrence ratios, and information incidence. The framework distinguishes supply-based applications (analyzing what is being published on the Internet, eg. on Web sites, newsgroups, blogs, microblogs and social media) from demand-based methods (search and navigation behavior), and further distinguishes passive from active infoveillance methods. Infodemiology metrics follow population health relevant events or predict them. Thus, these metrics and methods are potentially useful for public health practice and research, and should be further developed and standardized.

Subfields: Epidemiology, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df3e51ab397b2862d9c2bf37393d2147934617d3

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control (2011, background): “Such services are used by hundreds of millions of people who are publicly sharing various aspects about their daily lives, including those related to health behavior[8,9].”
Social Media: A Review and Tutorial of Applications in Medicine and Health Care (2014, background): “Examples of social media applications in health include (but are not limited to) access to educational resources by clinicians and patients [1-3], generation of content rich reference resources (eg, Wikipedia) [4], evaluation and reporting of real-time flu trends [5], catalyzing outreach during (pub”
Pandemics in the Age of Twitter: Content Analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 Outbreak (2010, methodology): “New ‘‘infoveillance’’ methods such as mining, aggregating, and analysing online textual data in real-time are becoming available [7,8].”
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact (2011, background): “Infodemiology is an emerging area of science with applications in public health [17,18] and a wide range of other areas [19]—it has, for example, been shown that search engine queries predict influenza [20,21], that tweets during the H1N1 pandemic correlated with incidence rates [22], and that…”
Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review (2021, background): “Infoveillance is the application of infodemiology with a primary aim of surveillance, which refers to surveilling and analyzing the unstructured information available on the internet in order to inform public health and public policy [15].”
Assessing the Methods, Tools, and Statistical Approaches in Google Trends Research: Systematic Review (2018, neutral): “The monitoring and analysis of internet data fall under the research field of infodemiology, that is, employing data collected from Web-based sources aiming at informing public health and policy [28].”
You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health (2011, background): “These results fall under the area of infodemiology (Eysenbach 2009).”
Google Trends in Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Methodology Framework (2019, methodology): “…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” [1], and “Infoveillance,” defined as “the longitudinal tracking of infodemiology metrics for surveillance and trend analysis” [2].”
Using Twitter to Examine Smoking Behavior and Perceptions of Emerging Tobacco Products (2013, background): “In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of a Twitter-based “infoveillance” [1] methodology to monitor perceptions of tobacco usage, with a special focus on new public health challenges posed by hookah and electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes).”