Thematic Correlation and Contextual Factors of Netizens' Information Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

[Purpose/Significance] Identifying the contextual factors of information needs is of great significance for understanding the generation mechanism of information needs. [Method/Process] Based on the background of the outbreak of COVID-19, this study crawled the question data from the Baidu Zhidao between December 31 in 2019 and March 30 in 2020, using methods such as content analysis and co-occurrence network analysis to identify the themes of netizens' information needs and the associations between them, and discover the characteristics of different information need themes under various contextual factors. [Results/Conclusions] This study extracted 8 primary themes and 33 secondary themes to reflect the information needs of netizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. The top five information needs with the highest attention from netizens are: impacts, preventions, controls, knowledge and education, and symptoms and treatments. From the perspective of the correlation analysis between themes, the relationship betwe