Previously submitted to: JMIR Medical Informatics (no longer under consideration since Feb 26, 2021)
Date Submitted: Feb 1, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
YouTube as a source of information on echocardiography: content and quality analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
YouTube, which is increasingly reachable to users every day, is becoming an easily accessible and increasingly popular source of information on health-related issues.
Objective:
Our study evaluated the scientific content and quality of echocardiography videos in English.
Methods:
For this study,583 videos identified as a result of a YouTube search made using the keyword “echocardiography” in July 2020 were evaluated. Moreover, 92 videos were included in the study following the evaluation of the exclusion criteria. Both video quality and scientific content were evaluated based on the discern score (DS), global quality score (GQS), content score (CS), and the total quality score (TQS) calculated by adding the scores of these three scoring systems.
Results:
Themean video duration of the videos included in the study was as 617 ± 708 s. Themean number of views was 94779 ± 181102, the number of upload days was 1859 ± 1223 days, the number of likes was 455 ± 793, and the number of dislikes was 22 ± 49. While the mean power index value of the videos was 1553812 ± 6004888, the popularity score was 46 ± 73. The mean DS was 3.4 ± 1, GQS was 3.7 ± 0.9, CS was 2.4 ± 1.1 and TQS was 9.67 ± 2.63. The study videos were analyzed in three groups based on TQS data. Group 1 (TQS: 5-7) comprised24 (26.08%) videos, Group 2 (TQS: 8-11) comprised43 (46.73%) videos, and Group 3 (TQS: 12-14) comprised 25 (27.17%) videos. Views, video duration, power index and popularity data were significantly higher in Group 3. Upload day was statistically significantly higher in Group 1.
Conclusions:
These results support the fact that the YouTube video sharing site is an important tool for easily sharing health-related information and disseminating it to large audiences. It can be concluded that the increasing interest in videos with scientific content and high quality scores indicates that the YouTube video sharing site provides accurate and quality information for echocardiography. Although the number of shared videos with high quality tends to increase day by day, professional users in the field of health should be encouraged to share videos with academic publication quality more frequently.
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