Recently, the European office of the World Health Organization (WHO) publishedDigital solutions to health risks raised by the COVID-19 infodemic policy brief, which introduced the policy suggestions and evidence for the prevention and treatment of false and untrue information ("COVID-19 infordemic") in COVID-19 on the Internet.The Causes, Impacts and Countermeasures of COVID-19 "Infodemic": A Systematic Review Using Narrative Synthesis, an article by Professor Feicheng Ma’s research group, was cited many times in this Brief, and some prevention strategies for infodemic in COVID-19 proposed in this article were adopted, and introduced to global health policy-making organizations.

The citation and conclusion of the article in Brief was that among the main cognitive and behavioral causes of infodemic, excessive use of social media and low digital health literacy are the significant reasons, which were the main findings of the article; Conspiracy beliefs and rumors spread will lead the public to reduce their willingness to take protective measures, such as keeping social distance, wearing masks and taking vaccination. This harm was also one of the main findings in this article. This article was included in the WHO COVID-19 research database, and this Brief included this article in Additional Reading to help WHO's European office form this Brief.

Human society has experienced an unprecedented COVID-19 epidemic, and the accompanying infodemic has also caused great damage to human society. The purpose of this article was to review and synthesize the existing literature on the causes and impacts of COVID-19 infodemic, summarize and put forward the prevention and control strategies of COVID-19 infodemic, and determine the future research direction. Following the PRISMA guideline, this article carried out a systematic literature search, covering 11 academic databases, to search various types of peer-reviewed articles, which reported the causes, impacts or countermeasures of this infodemic. Mixed-Methods Appraisal Tool was used to evaluate the bias risk of empirical research and iteratively develop a coding theme to classify the causes, impacts and countermeasures mentioned in the selected articles. This article found that excessive use of social media, low level of health/eHealth literacy, fast publication process and preprint service are considered as the main causes of the infodemic. In addition, the vicious circle of human rumor spreading behavior and public psychological issues, such as anxiety, distress and fear, are also the main features of this infodemic.

This article comprehensively summarized the countermeasures of infodemic from different perspectives, and published it inInformation Processing & Management, atop international journal of information science and information management.Wenjing Pian, Associate Professor at Fuzhou University, Part-time Researcher at the Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, is the first author.Jianxing Chi, doctoral student of the School of Information Management, Wuhan University, is the second author of the article.Feicheng Ma, Senior Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wuhan University, is corresponding author.

In recent years, Professor Feicheng Ma's research group has published more than 20 articles at home and abroad, discussing the countermeasures of infodemic, and the related views have aroused widespread concern.

At the beginning of this year, Professor Feicheng Ma's research group was interviewed by China Comment to introduce countermeasures of infodemic in COVID-19. After the interview was published in China Comment, it was reprinted and published by Xinhua News Agency, Xuexi.cn and other media and platforms, with more than one million readings, which had a great social impact. Professor Feicheng Ma's policy suggestions on infodemic prevention and control have also been adopted by the national government.

Links to the full article:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102713