Table 2 - uploaded by Ayelet Baram Tsabari
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Astrology-and astronomy-related popular searches according to Google Zeitgeist Country Query Share of popular searches (%)
Source publication
There is scant research-based evidence regarding what the public is interested in knowing about science, and more knowledge is needed to tailor relevant and engaging formal and free-choice science environments for different publics. This methodological paper describes the potential and limitations of three existing web-based tools — Google Trends,...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... provides a pos- sible methodological remedy for this semantic problem by indicating the appropriate search terms used in different countries to search for these topics. Table 2 summarizes the most popular searches related to astrology and astronomy as they appeared in GZ in 2004 and 2005. According to GZ many people use the term Horoscope in different variations when refer- ring to astrology. ...
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... To select a suitable case study, the most frequent online queries on scientific topics were examined using public data from Google Trends and professional web analytics tools (cf. Baram-Tsabari and Segev 2011;Thongmak 2023). To illustrate the growing online public engagement with science, a case study was selected that attracts significant public interest, but has so far been neither easy to categorize nor to clarify scientifically (cf. ...
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... Google Trends or Baidu Index also offer a pathway to examine public reactions to hot social events through its function to trace people's online search results. It has been found that the public's interest in science as represented by their Google searches is associated with media reporting of relevant subjects (Baram-Tsabari & Segev, 2011;Segev & Baram-Tsabari, 2012). My method for examining people's interests in the three target controversieshydropower, GMOs and nuclear poweris as follows. ...
... Google Trends or Baidu Index also offer a pathway to examine public reactions to hot social events through its function to trace people's online search results. It has been found that the public's interest in science as represented by their Google searches is associated with media reporting of relevant subjects (Baram-Tsabari & Segev, 2011;Segev & Baram-Tsabari, 2012). My method for examining people's interests in the three target controversieshydropower, GMOs and nuclear poweris as follows. ...
... Google Trends or Baidu Index also offer a pathway to examine public reactions to hot social events through its function to trace people's online search results. It has been found that the public's interest in science as represented by their Google searches is associated with media reporting of relevant subjects (Baram-Tsabari & Segev, 2011;Segev & Baram-Tsabari, 2012). My method for examining people's interests in the three target controversieshydropower, GMOs and nuclear poweris as follows. ...
... The study of web search data began in Ginsberg [11] by studying the main public health problem of seasonal influenza and the method of tracking the disease by analysing a large number of Google search queries was obtained. Besides, search engine data had been widely used in ranking universities [12], gathering public opinions [13,14], predicting stock market volumes [15], predicting flu trend [5,16], predicting academic fame [12], and forecasting tourist volume [2,17], tourist arrivals [5,18,19] and public transportation arrivals [6]. Search engine data were also used to forecast general economic indicators such as unemployment rates [20,21], and tourist consumptions [22]. ...
Abstract Accurately predicting railway passenger demand is conducive for managers to quickly adjust strategies. It is time‐consuming and expensive to collect large‐scale traffic data. With the digitization of railway tickets, a large amount of user data has been accumulated. We propose a method to predict railway passenger demand using web search terms data. In order to improve the prediction accuracy, we improved Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets (WGAN), which were good at generating and identifying data, by adding a predictor and supervised learning adversarial training to predict railway passenger demand. The improved WGAN could generate virtual data to expand real data, and use parallel data to predict railway passenger demand. We used search times of web search terms on different devices as training data to predict railway passenger demand in Beijing. The results show that the change in demand for railway passenger lags behind the change in the data of web search terms by one month. It is suitable for forecasting in advance. Compared with other forecasting methods, the improved WGAN performance is better, and the mean absolute percentage error is 1.98%. Because it can use mixed data for training and prediction, it has stronger adaptability when data scale decreases.
... To describe public interest in different areas, researchers use a top-down and a bottom-up approach. According to Baram-Tsabari (2011), most popularity lists are based on a top-down approach, i.e., identifying specific concepts that should be interesting or important to the public according to experts. Kovacic at all (2017) study aims to determine whether there are needs for athlets education, when the time for engaging in a secondary career comes. ...
Although government bodies, sport associations and funding organizations often need exact criterion for assessment of interests and trends for specific sports, there is no single definition of popularity determinants, as well as specific tool designed for reliable and valid measurement of particular sport's popularity. Consequently, there is lack of scientific-based evidence about the public interests in particular sport. This paper introduces the Google Trends (GT) as a web-based tool to identify and compare public interests for 5 Olympic team sports (volleyball, handball, water polo, football, basketball) according to the worldwide public Google queries transformed into 1-100 Likert type scale. Observing last 5 years using GT, it can be concluded that football (mean = 30) is the most popular analyzed sport followed by basketball (mean = 8), volleyball (mean = 3), handball (mean =1) and water polo (mean ≤1). It can be concluded that, although limited, GT can provide valuable information about public interests for specific sport on the global, regional, or local level.
... Figure 2 shows the volume of Google searches on the keywords "terror" or "terroriste" in conjunction with four recent terrorist attacks in Europe, generated by Google Trends [34]. In previous research, similar searches have been shown to consistently produce more statistically accurate data than other survey-based indicators of public attention and opinion [35][36][37][38]. In this case, it is clear that public attention, as measured by the volume of searches, follows the same two-week pattern as the inflow reduction. ...
Study objective: The objective of this study was to investigate how the terroris t attack in Stockholm, Sweden
affected patient inflow to the general emergency departments (EDs) in close proximity of the attack. The study
analyzed if, and to what extent, the attack impacted ED inflow during the following days and weeks.
Methods: In a retrospective observational study, anonymized aggregated data on ED arrivals (inflow of patients) to
all seven of the EDs in the Stockholm County was analyzed using the Difference-in-Diffe rences (DiD) estimator. The
control groups were the affected hospitals in the years prior to the terrorist attack. The number of ED visits was
retrieved from the Stockholm County Council administrative database.
Results: The study shows a statistically significant reduction in overall ED inflow of 7–9% following the attack. The
effect was strongest initial ly af ter the attack, and ED inflow regained normal levels within approximately three
weeks’ time, without any signif icant rebound effect. The effect on ED inflow also decreased with distance from
ground zero, and was not significant further away than 10 km.
Conclusion: The results showed that ED inflow was significantly decreased in the weeks immediately following the
Stockholm terrorist attack. The reasons for this cannot be fully explained in this observational study. However, the
results suggest that some patients actively choose when, where and if they should go to the ED.
Keywords: Emergency service, Hospital, Patient acceptance of health care, Terrorism, Health behavior
... The need for scientific and chemical literacy amongst K-12 students is justified by three reasons: economic and political involvement, practical personal reasons, and cultural reasons relating to ideals, values, and norms (Avargil et al., 2013). The ability to understand, and critically evaluate ideas and arguments in the media pertaining to chemistry content, enables one to cope with situations that citizens are likely to encounter in real-life scientific and technological contexts which surround them (Baram-Tsabari and Segev, 2011;Hofstein et al., 2011;Shea, 2015;Pabuccu and Erduran, 2016). Formal science education provides the basis for scientific literacy in general, and chemical literary in particular (Gilbert and Treagust, 2008). ...
... The scientists expressed views of the importance that various stakeholders (a) better understand what professional chemists do, (b) be aware of the societal context of chemistry within real-world contexts, and (c) be interested in chemistryrelated issues, the role of scientists and their contribution to the community (Holman, 2002;Shwartz et al., 2006;Shwartz et al., 2013;Dori et al., 2018). In order to achieve these goals, chemistry curricula should consider not just students' attainment of chemistry understanding, but also the knowledge of how to incorporate chemistry into daily lives in ways that members of the broader society are able to participate in discourse revolving around authentic chemistry, interest and needs (Baram-Tsabari and Segev, 2011;Hofstein et al., 2011;Blanco-López et al., 2015;Dori et al., 2018). The scientists emphasized the benefits of using the website for encouraging students to study and for breaking down the barriers between academia and the community. ...
Facilitating students' chemical literacy is a focal point of current science education. This study examines views of chemists and chemistry teachers on chemical literacy and, more broadly, on scientific literacy of four kinds of stakeholders: scientists, teachers, STEM students, and the educated public. We explored the views of 347 participants, representing the four stakeholder groups with diversified scientific literacy, and an Ask-a-Scientist public website as a communication channel for facilitating chemical literacy through posing questions. Research tools included interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and questions retrieved from the website. We found that the questions posed on the website expressed a range of levels of chemical literacy that the students had constructed. The stakeholder groups expressed diverse perspectives of their experiences using various types of communication channels, arguing for the need to encourage students to pose questions and receive scientists' responses. Our study is placed in the larger context of scientific literacy and communication channels, as it takes the example of chemical literacy, with a focus on communications among scientists and chemistry teachers in the context of an Ask-a-Scientist website. It has established a link between responses of various stakeholders and the literature definitions regarding scientific literacy with focus on chemical literacy. From a practical viewpoint, the study presents a productive communication channel for posing questions in the context of chemistry and other sciences. Methodologically, this study includes the design of tools for analyzing both the views of different stakeholders and for evaluating the complexity level of chemistry questions, which might serve chemistry educators.
... One of the few sport-based studies to utilize Google Trends data is by Kozman (2013) who measures interest in Tiger Woods, following his 2009 sex scandal. A similar methodology is employed by Baram-Tsabari and Segev (2011) who use Google Trends, Google Zeitgeist and Google Insights for Search (Google Zeitgeist and Google Insights for Search have since been incorporated into the Google Trends tool) to compare searches for science and pseudoscience over time. It is this methodological approach that this study takes, to be discussed further in the next section. ...
It is clear that hosting an Olympic Games can bring global interest to a city, but the extent to which an Olympic bid can be used for similar means is less apparent. Using Google Trends data, this research investigates the stages of an Olympic bid process that brings most attention to a bid city and where this interest comes from. This was achieved by investigating the number of searches for each bid city during the bid process. This research has found that those cities who do not reach the host city election receive comparatively fewer Google searches than those who have a realistic chance of hosting. The extent to which this can be considered global attention is questionable as the majority of searches originate in the nations of those cities involved in the bid.
... The prevalence of obesity and overweight varied across the states, with West Virginia having the highest prevalence (71.1%) and District of Columbia the lowest prevalence (54.4%) in 2016. Following the methods used in previous studies (Baram-Tsabari, 2011;Breyer & Eisenberg, 2010;Vosen & Schmidt, 2011), we used Google Trends to collect regional search data. Google Trends provides longitudinal search interest indexes that quantify search volumes as values ranging from 0 to 100 in relation to the peak volume for the given region and time (see trends.google.com). ...
Taking ecological perspectives to overweight and obesity, the current study applies data mining approach to examine the association between information and social environments and regional prevalence of overweight and obesity. In particular, we focus on online search and social media data since the increasing popularity of location-based geo-targeting could be an influential source of regional differences in health information and social environment. In Study 1, we calculated the correlation between regional overweight and obesity rates with regional Google searches for a time period of 12 years (2004 to 2016). The findings showed that in regions with high overweight and obesity rates, people were looking for and obtaining information on weight-loss and diet;, but in regions with low overweight and obesity rates, people were looking for and obtaining information on fitness services and facilities. In Study 2, we analyzed and compared 4010 tweets from Houston, a city with a high overweight and obesity rate, and 3281 tweets from San Diego, a city with a low overweight and obesity rate. The tweets were collected from August 2015 to August of 2016. We analyzed the textual content of tweets by word frequency analysis and topic modeling. The findings suggest that San Diego has a social environment that focuses on fitness and combining exercising with dieting. In contrast, Houston’s social environment emphasizes dieting. The implication of these findings is that health practitioners should push a paradigm shift to a stronger focus on “healthy life” (combining exercising and dieting) in regions with high overweight and obesity rates.
