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Omission of seminal study

Posted by Eysenbach on 26 Mar 2009 at 14:19 GMT

To our knowledge, no evaluation regarding syndromic surveillance has been performed on queries submitted to medical web sites, although this is assumed to be a useful source [9], [10]. Since the first submission of this paper, two studies on general purpose search engine queries have been published; one based on Google search queries [11] and one on Yahoo! search queries [12].
http://plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004378#article1.body1.sec1.p2

Inappropriate priority claim.

Method has been introduced by

Eysenbach G. Infodemiology: Tracking Flu-Related Searches on the Web for Syndromic Surveillance. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2006:244-8. PMID: 17238340
PMCID: PMC1839505
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1839505

No competing interests declared.

RE: Omission of seminal study

ahulth replied to Eysenbach on 30 Mar 2009 at 13:54 GMT

Thanks geysenba for pointing us to this work! Indeed a clever way to get hold of search data.

As mentioned in the introduction, we investigated search terms submitted to a medical web site, not a general purpose search engine. We should have been clearer on this point throughout the paper – our mistake!

/Anette (the first author)

No competing interests declared.