Dissemination of Tuberculosis Clinical Evidence - An Application of Network Analysis to Publicly Available Resources

Effective dissemination of Tuberculosis (TB) clinical evidence to healthcare providers is essential to address this pandemic. To identify, organize, and aggregate online TB information resources, we analyzed the websites of four CDC-funded TB Centers of Excellence (COE), identified the hosted resources, examined the outward linkages, and collected the external resources. We obtained 154 primary resources from TB COEs and 1521 linkages to external resources. We leveraged a network analysis approach to construct resource networks at the individual resource and parent site levels. We computed the degree of connectivity and PageRank for each node in the networks. Based on these analyses, we successfully identified important TB information hosting sites beyond the four TB COEs and individual TB resources widely cited. The initial results indicate that it is promising to use network analysis approaches to identify online clinical information resources. The generalizability of this approach needs to be examined in future research.