نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 دانشجوی دکتری علم اطلاعات و دانش شناسی دانشگاه قم، قم، ایران.
2 دانشیار گروه علم اطلاعات و دانش شناسی دانشگاه قم، قم، ایران
3 دانشیار فیزیولوژی ورزشی، دانشگاه قم، قم، ایران.
4 دانشیار گروه علم اطلاعات ودانششناسی، دانشگاه قم، قم، ایران
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
Purpose:
This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of health information seeking behavior (HISB) during public health crises by integrating bibliometric and altmetric approaches. It seeks to map the intellectual structure of the field, identify citation patterns and knowledge clusters, and explore the social attention surrounding scholarly outputs. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding how crises such as the COVID 19 pandemic influenced the temporal dynamics of research production, the emergence of key authors and countries, and interactions between academic and societal impact.
Methodology:
This applied, quantitative study employed a combined bibliometric and altmetric design. Data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection using an advanced search strategy constructed through Boolean operators (AND/OR). The search covered two major conceptual axes: health crises (“pandemic”, “health crisis”, “epidemic”, “public health emergency”) and information behavior (“health information behavior”, “information seeking”, “information searching”). Searches were performed in the topic fields (title, abstract, and keywords) without time restriction, yielding a corpus of 782 records published between 1992 and 2024. After screening and inclusion criteria—limited to peer reviewed papers with complete abstracts and citation data—were applied, the final dataset was analyzed. Altmetric data linked to article DOIs were collected from Altmetric.com. Bibliometric analyses were conducted using CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and the Bibliometrix package in R, focusing on co authorship, co word, and co citation networks, as well as trend and burst detection. Altmetric data were examined in terms of the distribution of attention scores and the relative contribution of different social media platforms.
Findings:
The results indicate that research output on HISB was modest and scattered until 2010, followed by continuous growth and a marked surge between 2020 and 2022, corresponding to the COVID 19 outbreak. This pattern highlights the event driven nature of the field. Highly cited studies primarily addressed themes such as health anxiety, misinformation, risk perception, information avoidance, and digital health literacy. Prominent scholars, notably Dadaczynski and Okan, played central roles in structuring the scientific discourse. Geographically, the United States, China, and the United Kingdom were the most productive countries, while nations such as Iran emerged as potential contributors in a developing research landscape. Publications were concentrated in multidisciplinary journals, especially the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), reflecting the cross disciplinary nature of the field.
From a societal perspective, the altmetric attention score exhibited a strongly right skewed distribution (mean = 25.90, median = 3), suggesting that only a limited subset of articles attracted substantial public attention. Correlation analysis revealed a weak but significant relationship between altmetric attention and citation counts, underscoring the complementary yet distinct dimensions of scientific and social impact.
Conclusion:
The findings demonstrate that during health crises, HISB research simultaneously mirrors scientific responsiveness and social dynamics of information engagement. The dominance of psychological and communicative topics, such as misinformation and anxiety, underlines the importance of effective health communication strategies in emergencies. However, the geographic and authorship concentration observed signals the need for broader international and interdisciplinary collaborations. Integrating bibliometric and altmetric indicators provides a more holistic understanding of the field’s dual dimension—academic influence and societal reach—and offers actionable insights for policymakers, science communicators, and future researchers aiming to enhance global health information equity.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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