2023 VOLUME 3 ISSUE 4
RESEARCH ARTICLE
How is pandemic perceived in China? A case study of COVID-19
AUTHOR
Houqiang Yu, Longfei Li, Yinghua Xie
ABSTRACT
To help the government better understand and manage public sentiments, and help the public establish the values of rational participation in online discussions related to COVID-19, it is necessary to explore the themes and emotions of different subjects discussing the pandemic on social media platforms. The study takes a comprehensive view by combining social media and scholarly outputs data. In particular, WeChat articles are investigated to reveal the public concern and public sentiment towards COVID-19, and WeChat mentions to scholarly papers are identified to show the interaction between the public and researchers. Text analysis is conducted to construct co-occurrence networks and reveal the distribution of themes. VOSviewer is applied to network visualization. Statistical and comparative analysis showed that discussion about COVID-19 keeps hot on WeChat. WeChat offical accounts from the information industry dominate, suggesting a free and flexible discussing environment. Topics on WeChat overlap with that of scholarly papers but have a much broader scope. WeChat mentions to scholarly papers has bridged the public with the research and has a high coverage of 61.7%. Public sentiment in WeChat is positive, demonstrating good confidence in defeating the pandemic. These findings are helpful in understanding the social attitude towards and comprehensive perception of COVID-19 in China.
KEYWORDS
Altmetrics; Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19); WeChat; China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI); Social media