This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Peer Reviews (221)

Published on in Vol 3, No 2 (2022): Apr-Jun

Peer Review of “Google Trends as a Predictive Tool for COVID-19 Vaccinations in Italy: Retrospective Infodemiological Analysis”

Peer Review of “Google Trends as a Predictive Tool for COVID-19 Vaccinations in Italy: Retrospective Infodemiological Analysis”

Peer Review of “Google Trends as a Predictive Tool for COVID-19 Vaccinations in Italy: Retrospective Infodemiological Analysis”

Authors of this article:

Artur Strzelecki1 Author Orcid Image
Article Authors Cited by (1) Tweetations (4) Metrics

    Peer-Review Report


    This is a peer-review report submitted for the paper “Google Trends as a Predictive Tool for COVID-19 Vaccinations in Italy: Retrospective Infodemiological Analysis.”


    General Comments

    The subject of the brief paper [1] “Google Trends as a Predictive Tool for COVID-19 Vaccinations in Italy: a Retrospective Infodemiological Analysis” is timely and valuable to the audience of JMIRx Med. Overall, the paper is well structured, reads exceptionally well, and covers the existing literature quite well. The analysis of the data is interesting and well documented.

    The author of the paper has selected keywords used in the Google Search engine, which could reveal an intention to take a vaccine against COVID-19 in Italy and compared this interest with headlines in the second most read newspaper in Italy. The paper has a transparent and replicable procedure to collect data and do statistical tests.

    The results show a marked and significant cross-correlation between web queries on vaccine reservations and actual vaccinations against COVID-19 in Italy. On the other hand, the cross-correlation between vaccine-related news and vaccine web searches is low.

    Specific Comments

    Minor Comments
    1. I think that the limitations of this study are much broader than those listed in the work. There is a strong vaccine hesitation movement across different European countries, which could at least be mentioned in the work. The authors only noticed news in a newspaper on rare side effects of vaccination. This is what strongly influences, on the one hand, queries entered into a search engine and, on the other hand, a decrease in the number of vaccinations.

    Conflicts of Interest

    None declared.

    1. Rovetta A. Google Trends as a predictive tool for COVID-19 vaccinations in Italy: a retrospective infodemiological analysis. JMIRx Med 2022;3(2):e35356 [FREE Full text]

    Edited by E Meinert; This is a non–peer-reviewed article. submitted 11.04.22; accepted 11.04.22; published 19.04.22

    Copyright

    ©Artur Strzelecki. Originally published in JMIRx Med (https://med.jmirx.org), 19.04.2022.

    This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIRx Med, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://med.jmirx.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.