Search bioRxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2020.06.01.127381

The knowledge and practice towards COVID-19 pandemic prevention among residents of Ethiopia. An online cross-sectional study.

Bekele, D.·Tolossa, T.·Tsegaye, R.·Teshome, W.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Background The Novel coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is now the international concerns and a pandemic, since the World Health Organization declared as the outbreaks. The objective of this study to assess the prevention knowledge and practices towards the COVID-19 among the residents of Ethiopia.Methods An online cross-sectional study was conducted among the sample of Ethiopian residents via social platforms of the author’s network with the popular media such as Facebook, in Ethiopia from the April 15-22, 2020 and successfully recruited 341 responses. The snowball sampling was employed to recruit the participants. The data were analyzed using STATA version 14. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the level of knowledge and practices.Results The majority of the respondents (80.35%) were male. The overall prevention knowledge of the participants towards the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was high. About 91.2% of the participant was heard about the novel coronavirus disease and Social Medias’ were the main source of the information. About 90% of the participants had a good prevention knowledge of maintaining social distance and frequent hand washing. The practices of the participants towards the COVID-19 prevention were very low. Out of 341 participants, only 61% and 84% of the participants were practicing social distance and frequent hand washing, respectively.Conclusions Majority of the participants had knew the ways of protecting themselves from the novel coronavirus. But, there was deficiencies of changing these prevention knowledge to practice. This indicates that there was gap between knowledge and implementation of prevention strategies in the community. The concerned body should focus on providing education for the community regarding the implementation of the prevention knowledge to practice.AbbreviationsFFNCFamily, friends, neighbor, and colleaguesMoHMinistry of HealthSARSSevere Acute Respiratory SyndromeMERSMiddle East Respiratory SyndromeWHOWorld Health OrganizationView Full Text

Source connections

Explore related subjects

scientific communication and educationPreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Bekele, D., Tolossa, T., Tsegaye, R., Teshome, W.. 2020-06-01. The knowledge and practice towards COVID-19 pandemic prevention among residents of Ethiopia. An online cross-sectional study.. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.01.127381

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Evaluating Large Language Models as Tools to Navigate Researchers in Rapidly Evolving Research Landscapes: A Case Study in Cancer Drug Response Prediction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools for assisting researchers in automating and accelerating the synthesis of literature reviews. However, their reliability is a significant concern due to issues like factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. The key question is whether LLMs can reliably provide comprehensive, up-to-date overviews and analyses. This study evaluates the performance of three leading LLMs (OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek) on the complex task of generating a comprehensive survey paper on deep learning for cancer Drug Response Prediction (DRP). By testing both standard and Deep Research (DR) / Deep Think (DT) modes of LLMs with prompts of varying detail, this paper assesses key academic dimensions, including reference management, content quality, and analytical depth. Key findings reveal that while DR modes of LLMs significantly improve reliability by eliminating hallucinations, performance variations exist across models and prompts. A trade-off between reference quantity and integration quality was observed, and even the best-performing models lacked the analytical depth of human experts, often requiring extensive human supervision. The study concludes that LLMs currently serve as powerful assistive tools but still cannot replace the critical validation and synthesis provided by human researchers. Choosing the best LLM to use depends on the task in hand, while several strategies can be implemented to improve the produced output.

scientific communication and education↗
bioRxiv2021

Information silos distort biomedical research

Information silos have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientists own community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly blamed for this phenomenon, despite recent improvements in information retrieval and text mining. Its actual negative impact on scientific progress, however, has never been quantified. This analysis attempts to do so by exploring its effects on biomedical discovery, particularly in the discovery of relations between diseases, genes and chemical compounds. Results indicate that the probability that two scientific facts will enable the discovery of a new fact depends on how far apart these two facts were published within the scientific landscape. In particular, the probability decreases exponentially with the citation distance. Thus, the direction of scientific progress is distorted based on the location in which each scientific fact is published, representing a path-dependent bias in which originally closely-located discoveries drive the sequence of future discoveries. To counter this bias, scientists should open the scope of their scientific work with modern computational approaches.

scientific communication and education↗
bioRxiv2021

Delineating Medical Education: Bibliometric Research Approach(es)

BackgroundThe field of medical education remains poorly delineated such that there is no broad consensus of the articles and journals that comprise "the field." This lack of consensus has implications for conducting bibliometric studies and other research designs (e.g., systematic reviews); it also challenges the field to compare citation scores in the field and across others and for an individual to identify themselves as "a medical education researcher." Other fields have utilized bibliometric field delineation, which is the assigning of articles or journals to a certain field in an effort to define that field. ProcessIn this Research Approach, three bibliometric field delineation approaches -- information retrieval, core journals, and journal co-citation -- are introduced. For each approach, the authors describe their attempt to apply it in the medical education context and identify related strengths and weaknesses. Based on co-citation, the authors propose the Medical Education Journal List 24 (MEJ-24), as a starting point for delineating medical education and invite the community to collaborate on improving and potentially expanding this list. PearlsAs a research approach, field delineation is complicated, and there is no clear best way to delineate the field of medical education. However, recent advances in information and computer science provide potentially more fruitful approaches to deal with the complexity of the field. When considering these emerging approaches, researchers should consider collaborating with bibliometricians. Bibliometric approaches rely on available metadata for articles and journals, which necessitates that researchers examine the metadata prior to analysis to understand its strengths and weaknesses, and to assess how this might affect their data interpretation. While using bibliometric approaches for field delineation is valuable, it is important to remember that these techniques are only as good as the research teams interpretation of the data, which suggests that an expanded research approach is needed to better delineate medical education, an approach that includes active discussion within the medical education community.

scientific communication and education↗