Science communication and information behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: an analysis of survey data and interviews

The corona pandemic, like many other crises, caused a high demand for information among citizens. At the same time, a large amount of science information was disseminated through various channels, often including social media. Thus, new opportunities to observe users arose for research on information behaviour, but also new methodological challenges to relate this behaviour to other consumption of news and science communication. This paper presents a mixed-methods approach that combines a survey on the use and evaluation of information sources with observations from a user study. For the latter, result lists of various web and video searches were used in an experiment as a starting point to determine selection methods and quality criteria for science communication. Both methodological approaches showed that the reliability and familiarity of a source play a dominant role in selection decisions.