The rise of infodemiology and infoveillance during COVID-19 crisis

Springer, Steffen; Zieger, Michael; Strzelecki, Artur

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.