Digital Epidemiology: Use of Digital Data Collected for Non-epidemiological Purposes in Epidemiological Studies

Park, Hyeoun-Ae; Jung, Hyesil; On, Jeongah; Park, Seul Ki; Kang, Hannah

The key words used in the PubMed search are presented in Table 1 . This search identified 853 potential articles for inclusion. A multistage review process was used to select articles for review. Four authors independently reviewed the titles and abstracts of the retrieved publications. We excluded 753 articles that met at least one of the exclusion criteria. These articles were review, commentary, or perspective articles. They did not use substantial digital data, and they focused on plant or animal epidemiology. In total, 100 articles met our inclusion criteria and were subjected to full-text review by the authors. This resulted in the exclusion of seven survey or intervention studies that utilized social media ( Figure 1 ).