Methodology of Baidu Index for Infodemiology and Infoveillance (Preprint)

作者：Ming Ma, Hui Li, Mengli Zhu, Tao Lin, Turun Song · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.2196/preprints.37995 · 研究领域：Data-Driven Disease Surveillance、Misinformation and Its Impacts、Health Literacy and Information Accessibility

BACKGROUND Baidu Index is an open tool that provides information about trends and changes in online interest in selected keywords and topics over time. The analysis of Baidu queries has become a valuable tool for researchers to explore and predict human behavior, disease occurrence and outbreaks. Although Baidu Index has been applied to many fields in China, there is no research to describe a specific methodology framework of Baidu Index in detail. OBJECTIVE Make a retrospective analysis of the application of Baidu Index in the medical field, and summarize the methodology of Baidu Index for infodemiology and infoveillance. METHODS We searched the PubMed database for articles from January 2003 to January 2022 with the keywords: ‘Baidu Index’, and the methods of applying Baidu Index in all articles were reviewed and summarized. Combined with the operational guidance from the Baidu Index official website and our previous research, we explained the methodology of applying Baidu Index. RESULTS A total of 134 articles were detected. According to the types of diseases concerned in the article, they are roughly divided into: covid-19 (21/134, 15.67%), influenza (8/134, 5.97%), infectious diseases (15/134, 11.19%), sexually transmitted diseases (4/134, 2.99%), others (25/134, 18.66%), and unrelated articles (61/134, 45.52%). The ‘search index’, ‘demand map’, and ‘user portrait’ are the three main parts of Baidu Index. Each part corresponds to different data types an...