Widening Disparities in Online Information Access during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a staggering increase in online information access (1, 2), but the extent to which different communities of internet users enlist digital resources to meet everyday needs varies (2-4). We analyze 55 billion everyday web search interactions across 25,150 US ZIP codes and demonstrate that there were disparate impacts of the pandemic on online information access across several information domains, including health and pandemic-relevant online resources (e.g., online learning, online food delivery). Among many findings, we show that ZIP codes associated with higher proportions of Black residents intensified their access to unemployment resources, and ZIP codes associated with lower income reduced their access to health information resources relative to their counterpart ZIP codes. Because these disparate impacts on the access to online information may result in downstream offline gaps in health, education, employment, and well-being (3), public health interventions should target potential barriers to accessing the necessary digital resources and provide adequate support to meet the intensified digital resource needs. One Sentence SummaryLarge-scale web search logs reveal disparate impacts on online health, education, unemployment, and food information access.

SciSight: Combining faceted navigation and research group detection for COVID-19 exploratory scientific search

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked unprecedented mobilization of scientists, generating a deluge of papers that makes it hard for researchers to keep track and explore new directions. Search engines are designed for targeted queries, not for discovery of connections across a corpus. In this paper, we present SciSight, a system for exploratory search of COVID-19 research integrating two key capabilities: first, exploring associations between biomedical facets automatically extracted from papers (e.g., genes, drugs, diseases, patient outcomes); second, combining textual and network information to search and visualize groups of researchers and their ties. SciSight1 has so far served over 15K users with over 42K page views and 13% returns.