Abstract
The last five years have seen a leap in the development of information technology and social media. Seeking health information online has become popular. It has been widely accepted that online health information seeking behavior has a positive impact on health information consumers. Due to its importance, online health information seeking behavior has been investigated from different aspects. However, there is lacking a systematic review that can integrate the findings of the most recent research work in online health information seeking, and provide guidance to governments, health organizations, and social media platforms on how to support and promote this seeking behavior, and improve the services of online health information access and provision. We therefore conduct this systematic review. The Google Scholar database was searched for existing research on online health information seeking behavior between 2016 and 2021 to obtain the most recent findings. Within the 97 papers searched, 20 met our inclusion criteria. Through a systematic review, this paper identifies general behavioral patterns, and influencing factors such as age, gender, income, employment status, literacy (or education) level, country of origin and places of residence, and caregiving role. Facilitators (i.e., the existence of online communities, the privacy feature, real-time interaction, and archived health information format), and barriers (i.e., low health literacy, limited accessibility and information retrieval skills, low reliable, deficient and elusive health information, platform censorship, and lack of misinformation checks) to online health information seeking behavior are also discovered.
Highlights
With the proliferation of information and communication technology, utilizing the Internet to seek health information becomes a prevalent behavior [1,2,3,4])
Only involving papers published recently ensures that the findings integrated into our systematic review are up to date; on the other hand, it could avoid repetitive review work on online health information seeking behavior (HISB) [18,20]
The article focuses on the evaluation of the algorithm, search engines, or information technology to improve online health information seeking; The article is not written in English; The article is not published in the peer-reviewed journals or top proceedings, such as chapters or books; The article is a review
Summary
With the proliferation of information and communication technology, utilizing the Internet to seek health information becomes a prevalent behavior [1,2,3,4]). Online health information seeking behavior (HISB) has become a global trend [13]. A recent study indicated that in 2008, 61.2% of the population sought health information online first for their most recent search, while in 2017, the percentage had reached 74.4% [15]. It is essential to review the most recent academic papers to have an overall up-to-date picture of online HISB research, provide timely and useful guidance to governments, health organizations, media, and online platforms to support and promote online HISB, and direct future studies. HISB; (ii) to identify factors that could influence online HISB; (iii) to find out the facilitators and barriers to online HISB; (iv) to provide suggestions to health agencies/organizations and social media platforms to support and promote online HISB, and improve their services of online health information provision/access; and (v) to discuss the limitations of current research and come up with suggestions for future studies and future research directions.
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