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Return to COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook & Wiki entry page

Note: text in green identifies latest update. (See last updated time stamp at top of page.)

SciBeh Knowledge Base

What is the knowledge base?

Rationale

Crises are often accompanied by a flood of new information. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, new information such as that pertaining to the transmissability and fatality of the virus or the efficacy of the vaccines emerged almost every single day. Such information is not limited to peer-reviewed articles or even preprints, but includes, amongst others, reports from governments, think tanks, and NGOs, newspaper articles and opinion pieces, as well as Twitter threads on new findings and their critical discussion.

SciBeh argues that researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders need a curated—even if not yet fully vetted—overview over this emerging knowledge. The current knowledge base represents our ongoing attempt at providing such a service (for more information, see Herzog, 2020).

Overview

SciBeh collects input from different sources: discussions on Twitter, Reddit, links sent to us by contributors. Our team of volunteers annotate all of these links—each volunteer annotates 100s each week!—using hypothes.is. When an item is annotated, it gets added to SciBeh’s hypothes.is collection.

You can also check out this short video on how to use the knowledge base:

The links lead you to our knowledge base. The link on each Wiki page has been tailored by our team of volunteers to retrieve material most relevant to that particular page. Specifically, volunteers came up with a number of candidate search terms for each Wiki page and then rated how well each seach term performed, in terms of the results' relevance. Each search term was then independently rated by two additional volunteers and the most consistently high scoring search terms were selected to be presented on the Wiki pages. However, you can easily customise the search terms to suit your specific needs (e.g., to obtained more refined results).

Narrowing results and refining queries

You can refine a search by typing an extra keyword into the knowledge base search engine, in addition to the existing search terms. Essentially, this conducts a search within the items that have already come up. You can also search by tags by modifying the query using 'tag:', which would narrow the search based on specific tags our volunteers included. For example, querying "misinformation" and "tag:vaccine" returns results of items that contain the word "misinformation" and that include a volunteer-annotated "vaccine" tag.

Limitations

Our hope is that, by linking the knowledge base with the Wiki and facilitating access to original sources and discussions, we can promote a culture of self fact-checking. However, our approach is not without limitations. Currently, the order in which items appear is not sorted by date. Therefore, people searching for information may need to pay attention to the timing of the release of the information. People should also use their discernment as to which information from the search results is most useful to them. While we have attempted to ensure that the majority of search results are relevant to the search term, some of the items may still be of less relevance to the user.

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