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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health — Open Access Journal

                 SPECIAL ISSUE: "Health Misinformation on Social Media"

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SPECIAL ISSUE INFORMATION:

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Special Issue entitled: “Health Misinformation on Social Media” in 
the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The venue is a 
peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes articles and communications in the 
interdisciplinary area of environmental health sciences and public health. For detailed 
information on the journal, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

Today, the success of the Social Web and the massive use of social media is making an 
increasingly large number of people rely on information diffused on these applications. 
In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the explosion of so-called User-Generated 
Content (UGC), i.e., content diffused by users on social media without almost any 
traditional form of control of its quality or veracity by reputable third parties. 
This can represent a problem especially in the health scenario, in which a large 
portion of people seeks health-related information.

Prior research indicates that medical professionals do not author an extensive amount 
of health-related information available on social media. This creates the conditions for 
spreading false, inaccurate or misleading health-related information, thereby 
potentially leading ill people away from proper care.

Therefore, the aim of this Special Issue is to address and investigate this problem by 
assessing perceptions of credibility about health-related information found on social 
media, under different perspectives. For example, by analyzing the Social Web for 
identifying suitable sources of health-related information (blogs, microblogs, 
question-answering systems, etc.); evaluating the impact of health misinformation; 
studying and implementing models for the credibility assessment of the acquired 
health-related information from social media; and studying and implementing models 
for the prevention of health misinformation diffusion in social media.

This Special Issue is aimed at scholars and researchers involved in different research 
areas, from medical informatics to sociology to medicine, confirming the 
interdisciplinary character of the journal.

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KEYWORDS

- Social Web and health information diffusion
- Models and technologies for health information credibility assessment
- Models and technologies to prevent health misinformation diffusion
- Impact of health misinformation in social media
- Crowdsourcing and health information/misinformation assessment
- Knowledge-bases applied to health information credibility
- Health and media literacy
- Health information retrieval
- Recommending genuine health information
- Decision-making in dealing with health information/misinformation
- Filter bubbles and echo chambers in the diffusion of health misinformation

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MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging 
into this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. 
Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. 
Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) 
and  will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review 
articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and 
short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement 
on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under 
consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). 
All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. 
A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is 
available on the Instructions for Authors page. 
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international 
peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. 
The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 
1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. 
Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or 
during author revisions.

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IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 July 2020.

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GUEST EDITOR:

Dr. Marco Viviani
University of Milano-Bicocca
Department of Informatics, Systems, and Communication (DISCo)

Interests: social media analytics; information retrieval; trust and reputation systems; 
information credibility assessment; social computing; multicriteria decision making; 
aggregation operators.

http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/people/marco-viviani/

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VISIBILITY:

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is ndexed by the 
Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Social Sciences Citation Index 
(Web of Science), MEDLINE (PubMed), Scopus (Elsevier) and other databases.