Dataset of news articles from March 10, 2023 to August 1, 2023 mentioning "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses"

To gather news articles from the web that discuss the Cochrane Review (DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6), we retrieved articles on August 1, 2023 from used Altmetric.com's Altmetric Explorer. We selected all articles that were written in English, published in the United States, and had a publication date on or after March 10, 2023 (according to the "Mention Date" from Altmetric.com). This date is significant as it is when Cochrane issued a statement (https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses-review) about the "misleading interpretation" of the Cochrane Review made by news articles.

A previously published dataset for "Arguing about Controversial Science in the News: Does Epistemic Uncertainty Contribute to Information Disorder?" (DOI: 10.13012/B2IDB-4781172_V1) contains annotation of the news articles published before March 10, 2023. Our dataset annotates the news published on or after March 10, 2023.

The Altmetric_data.csv describes the selected news articles with both data exported from Altmetric Explorer and data we manually added

Data exported from Altmetric Explorer:
- Publication date of the news article
- Title of the news article
- Source/publication venue of the news article
- URL
- Country

Data we manually added:
- Whether the article is accessible
- The date we checked the article
- The corresponding ID of the article in MAXQDA

For each article from Altmetric.com, we first tried to use the Web Collector for MAXQDA to download the article from the website and imported it into MAXQDA (version 22.8.0).

We manually extracted direct quotations from the articles using MAXQDA.
We included surrounding words and sentences around direct quotations for context where needed.

We manually added codes and code categories in MAXQDA to identify the individuals (chief editors of the Cochrane Review, government agency representatives, journalists, and other experts such as physicians) or organizations (government agencies, other organizations, and research publications) who were quoted.

The MAXQDA_data.csv file contains excerpts from the news articles that contain the direct quotations we annotated.
For each excerpt, we included the following information:
- MAXQDA ID of the document from which the excerpt originates
- The collection date and source of the document
- The code we assigned to the excerpt
- The code category
- The excerpt itself