Background
Institutions, government departments, and healthcare professionals engage in social media because it facilitates reaching a large number of people simultaneously. YouTube provides a platform whereby anyone can upload videos and gain feedback on their content from other users. Many YouTube videos are related to health and science, and many people search YouTube for health-related information. YouTube has been acknowledged as a key public information source in recent crises caused by Zika, H1N1, swine flu, and most recently, COVID-19.
Methods
YouTube videos were collected from the YouTube Application Programming Interface (API) using the search terms COVID-19, coronavirus, COVID19, and corona. The search was conducted on April 4 and 5, 2020. The initial investigation found a total of 1084 videos. The second step involved identifying and verifying the videos for their relationship to COVID-19 information and excluding videos that did not relate to COVID-19 or were in a language other than English and Hindi.
Results
An analysis of YouTube videos covering COVID-19, uploaded in early 2020, in English and Hindi. The sample comprised 349 videos (n = 334 English). Videos were characterized by contributor, duration, content, and reception (views/likes/dislikes/comments). The majority contained general information, with only 4.01% focusing on symptoms and 11.17% on treatment and outcomes. Further, the majority (n = 229) were short videos of under 10 min duration. Videos provided by government and health care professionals comprised 6.87% and 5.74% % of the sample, respectively. News channels uploaded 71.63% of videos.
Conclusions
YouTube may provide a significant resource for disseminating of information on public health issues like outbreaks of viral infections and should be utilized by healthcare agencies for this purpose. However, there is currently no way to determine whether a video has been produced or verified by authorized healthcare professionals. This limitation needs to be addressed so that the vital distribution services offered by platforms like YouTube can be fully utilized for increasing public understanding of healthcare science, particularly during a crisis such as a pandemic.
Library and information science education (LIS) has been spreading out all over India. Every state, one or more institutes/universities, offers LIS education. The research papers contributed by both academics and working professionally in the libraries. This paper examines the current trends of LIS publications in India from 2014 to 2018. The study reviewed 1357 documents from 2014 to 2018 indexed in the Scopus database. The study found that majority of the 342 (25.2%) papers published in the year 2018. Favorite source for publications was DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology. Similarly, LIS Indians professional more likely to published research papers collaboratively. Further noted that most frequently used keywords were scientometric, bibliometrics, India and authorship patterns, etc. The degree of collaboration (DC) for five years was 0.79. The analysis of co-citations of reference sources or cited sources indicated that “Scientometric,” and “Annals of library and information studies” mentioned in their articles.
The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the publication of many scientific papers. The goal of the present research was to analyse these papers using the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). Statistics for 100 publications with high AAS scores were selected and exported from the Dimension database on May 22nd 2020. The major findings were that these publications were published in 34 different journals or preprint repositories. More than one-third of the total of 657, 350 posts were collected from the Twitter platform. The top contributing countries were China, followed by the USA. The paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” by Andersen, Kristian G., etal., 2020 had the highest AAS (33 514. These findings may help others to design studies of the AAS in Covid-19 literature and compare them with traditional citations.
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