Abstract The development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools have raised several concerns about the effectiveness of assessment practice. Authentic assessment has emerged as one of the key strategies to cope with the rapidly evolving technology. Nevertheless, prior studies argued that authentic assessment as a standalone instrument is insufficient to control the impact of AI. Thus, several studies called for the integration of AI in assessment design. However, it is unclear how academics can deploy the use of AI in authentic assessment. This paper aims to present AI‐enabled authentic assessment strategies through evidence synthesis. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we collected 103 documents from multiple databases and utilised text mining techniques, including co‐occurrence analysis and topic modelling, to synthesise the documents. The results showed that academic integrity, critical thinking, framework, integration of AI, and teaching and learning methods are the dominant themes across the analysis. Most importantly, our findings identified four pathways in which AI can be deployed. Therefore, we propose the DAD (Deployment options, AI role, and Deliverables) conceptual framework to organise knowledge and guide the future design of AI‐enabled authentic assessment. Context and implications Rationale for this study: The emergence and increasing usage of AI technologies have challenged assessment practices in higher education. While a growing number of studies have proposed various solutions, including frameworks, they address a certain discipline or isolated element, such as authenticity or reflective practice. Why the new findings matter: Our results provide a more holistic and theoretically grounded assessment strategy addressing the alignment between AI integration, pedagogical design, and cognitive engagement to evidence learning in an assessment of learning context. Implications for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers: For authenticity, our result emphasises the need for academics, education practitioners, and policymakers to ensure assessment of learning policies is not against the use of AI. As AI continues to evolve, our result suggests that education practitioners need to ensure that assessment design allows the use of AI as both an agent and a tool to mirror ‘real‐world’ professional context without undermining cognitive engagement.

Health misinformation circulating during pandemics can gain traction rapidly, creating harmful narratives that compete with public health guidance. Most topic-modelling pipelines treat engagement as an external outcome, limiting their ability to prioritise semantically coherent topics that are also rapidly diffusing. We introduce BERTopic-VP, a virality-prioritised topic-modelling framework that combines contextual embedding-based clustering (BERTopic) with a post hoc Virality Prioritisation (VP) layer. The pipeline is complemented by a two-stage hybrid misinformation detection module that fuses a supervised content-based classifier with an external verification signal derived from public-health knowledge bases. Applied to three benchmark datasets, COVID-19_FNIR, Monkeypox, and Constraint, the framework achieves strong classification performance, with F1 up to 0.950 and ROC-AUC up to 0.989, while identifying high-impact clusters under top 1

This paper presents a multi-branch fusion framework for detecting and characterising the propagation of health misinformation in online social networks (OSNs). Grounded in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the model fuses transformer-based semantics with rhetorical cues, stance representations, and psychologically motivated proxies in a unified multi-task architecture. In addition to binary classification, we introduce the Cognitive Propagation Score (CPS), an interpretable post-hoc auxiliary score computed from psychologically motivated, text-derived cues capturing argument complexity, emotional intensity, and content-derived virality potential, to support diffusion-risk reasoning when engagement ground truth is incomplete or unavailable. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, Constraint, COVID–19_FNIR, and Monkeypox, show strong classification performance, achieving ROC–AUC up to 0.9999 on COVID–19_FNIR, while propagation-oriented ranking achieves near-perfect agreement when engagement-derived supervision is available (Monkeypox, Spearman's ρ= 0.9952) and similarly high ranking alignment under proxy-based supervision on COVID–19_FNIR (ρ= 0.9954). Compared with representative literature baselines, the fusion model improves detection on Constraint and COVID–19_FNIR, while Monkeypox remains more challenging, reflecting domain- and signal-specific differences. Ablation analysis further indicates that psychological and rhetorical branches provide complementary gains beyond semantic embeddings. Overall, the framework bridges cognitive theory and neural modelling to improve transparency and to support scalable misinformation monitoring, with future work required to validate CPS against human-centred diffusion judgements.

The emergence of Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, a relatively new class of medications for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, has been accompanied by reports of adverse effects observed during clinical trials. However, uncertainty over their safety and efficacy in wider, unselected populations has led to discussion and speculation on social media such as Reddit. Social networks represent a novel, rich source of real-world pharmacovigilance data. They are also an environment where unverified information about these medications may circulate. This paper analyzes Reddit conversations related to JAK inhibitors, applying graph modeling and community detection techniques using Neo4j and the Louvain algorithm. Data from 2011 to 2024 were collected, cleaned, and used to construct a directed graph, incorporating posts, comments, users, and drug mentions as nodes and their interactions as edges. Advanced computational methods, including large language models, were utilized to analyze textual data and identify patient-reported experiences that diverge from current medical consensus. This study systematically maps online discourse and identifies key participants to understand how patient experiences and concerns about JAK inhibitors are shared within communities. The findings show that various subreddits serve as hubs of information in which key influencers are spreading both positive and negative information within the Reddit ecosystem. Highlighting the potential to integrate graph-based approaches, Neo4j, and advanced LLMs in real-time pharmacovigilance, this study presents compelling evidence of the emerging conversations surrounding JAK inhibitors and how they affect public health ### Competing Interest Statement AA has received honoraria from UCB and Almirall, educational support from Almirall, Janssen and UCB to attend conferences, and has previously received funding from the UK North West MRC Scheme which is part-funded by Eli Lilly, UCB, Roche and Novartis. ### Funding Statement Yes ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: Manchester Metropolitan University I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes In line with the terms and conditions of the Reddit online service, the authors do not have permission to share the data extracted from the social media platform.

This study presents a hybrid epidemiological and behavioural framework to simulate the spread of health misinformation on social media. We extend the classical Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) model to a six-compartment structure (SIRMMM), incorporating Misinformed Susceptible (MS), Misinformed Infected (MI), and Misinformed Recovered (MR) compartments to better reflect the dynamics of the misinformation lifecycle. To account for individual-level behavioural variation, we extend the SIRMMM model by integrating psychological signals from the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), including sentiment polarity, engagement metrics, and cognitive effort, which dynamically modulate the misinformation transmission rate, yielding the ELM-SIRMMM framework. Model parameters were estimated using the FibVID dataset, which captures COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter. Generalisability was tested on two additional datasets: MC-Fake (emotional misinformation) and Monant (general health misinformation). Results show that the ELM-SIRMMM model enhances both predictive accuracy and dynamic realism. On FibVID, it decreases RMSE by 5.5

The rapid spread of health misinformation on online social networks (OSNs) during global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges to public health, social stability, and institutional trust. Centrality metrics have long been pivotal in understanding the dynamics of information flow, particularly in the context of health misinformation. However, the increasing complexity and dynamism of online networks, especially during crises, highlight the limitations of these traditional approaches. This study introduces and compares three novel centrality metrics: dynamic influence centrality (DIC), health misinformation vulnerability centrality (MVC), and propagation centrality (PC). These metrics incorporate temporal dynamics, susceptibility, and multilayered network interactions. Using the FibVID dataset, we compared traditional and novel metrics to identify influential nodes, propagation pathways, and misinformation influencers. Traditional metrics identified 29 influential nodes, while the new metrics uncovered 24 unique nodes, resulting in 42 combined nodes, an increase of 44.83%. Baseline interventions reduced health misinformation by 50%, while incorporating the new metrics increased this to 62.5%, an improvement of 25%. To evaluate the broader applicability of the proposed metrics, we validated our framework on a second dataset, Monant Medical Misinformation, which covers a diverse range of health misinformation discussions beyond COVID-19. The results confirmed that the advanced metrics generalised successfully, identifying distinct influential actors not captured by traditional methods. In general, the findings suggest that a combination of traditional and novel centrality measures offers a more robust and generalisable framework for understanding and mitigating the spread of health misinformation in different online network contexts.

Health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly challenged public health efforts globally. This study applies the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to enhance misinformation detection on social media using a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. The model aims to enhance the detection accuracy and reliability of misinformation classification by integrating ELM-based features such as text readability, sentiment polarity, and heuristic cues (e.g., punctuation frequency). The enhanced model achieved an accuracy of 97.37

IntroductionThis study investigates how linguistic features distinguish health misinformation from factual communication in pandemic-related online discourse. Understanding these differences is essential for improving detection of misinformation and informing effective public health messaging during crises.MethodsWe conducted a computational linguistic analysis across three corpora: COVID-19 false narratives (n = 7,588), general COVID-19 content (n = 10,700), and Monkeypox-related posts (n = 5,787). We examined readability, rhetorical markers, and persuasive language, focusing on differences between misinformation and factual communication.ResultsCOVID-19 misinformation exhibited markedly lower readability scores and contained more than twice the frequency of fear-related and persuasive terms compared to the other datasets. It showed minimal use of exclamation marks, contrasting with the more emotive style of Monkeypox content. These findings suggest that misinformation employs a deliberately complex rhetorical style combined with emotional cues, which may enhance perceived credibility.DiscussionOur findings contribute to the growing body of research on digital health misinformation by identifying linguistic indicators that can aid in detection. They also inform theoretical models of crisis communication and public health messaging strategies in networked media environments. However, the study has limitations, including reliance on traditional readability indices, a narrow persuasive lexicon, and static aggregate analysis. Future work should adopt longitudinal designs, incorporate broader emotion lexicons, and employ platform-sensitive approaches to improve robustness. The data and code supporting this study are openly available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17024569.

Macroeconomic factors have a critical impact on banking credit risk, which cannot be directly controlled by banks, and therefore, there is a need for an early credit risk warning system based on the macroeconomy. By comparing different predictive models (traditional statistical and machine learning algorithms), this study aims to examine the macroeconomic determinants’ impact on the UK banking credit risk and assess the most accurate credit risk estimate using predictive analytics. This study found that the variance-based multi-split decision tree algorithm is the most precise predictive model with interpretable, reliable, and robust results. Our model performance achieved 95% accuracy and evidenced that unemployment and inflation rate are significant credit risk predictors in the UK banking context. Our findings provided valuable insights such as a positive association between credit risk and inflation, the unemployment rate, and national savings, as well as a negative relationship between credit risk and national debt, total trade deficit, and national income. In addition, we empirically showed the relationship between national savings and non-performing loans, thus proving the “paradox of thrift”. These findings benefit the credit risk management team in monitoring the macroeconomic factors’ thresholds and implementing critical reforms to mitigate credit risk.

The higher education (HE) sector benefits every nation's economy and society at large. However, their contributions are challenged by advanced technologies like generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive assessment of GenAI tools towards assessment and pedagogic practice and, subsequently, discuss the potential impacts. This study experimented using three assessment instruments from data science, data analytics, and construction management disciplines. Our findings are two-fold: first, the findings revealed that GenAI tools exhibit subject knowledge, problem-solving, analytical, critical thinking, and presentation skills and thus can limit learning when used unethically. Secondly, the design of the assessment of certain disciplines revealed the limitations of the GenAI tools. Based on our findings, we made recommendations on how AI tools can be utilised for teaching and learning in HE.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in academia is a subjective and hotly debated topic. Currently, there are no agreed guidelines towards the usage of GenAI systems in higher education (HE) and, thus, it is still unclear how to make effective use of the technology for teaching and learning practice. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research on GenAI for teaching and learning in HE. To this end, this study conducted a systematic review of relevant studies indexed by Scopus, using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The search criteria revealed a total of 625 research papers, of which 355 met the final inclusion criteria. The findings from the review showed the current state and the future trends in documents, citations, document sources/authors, keywords, and co-authorship. The research gaps identified suggest that while some authors have looked at understanding the detection of AI-generated text, it may be beneficial to understand how GenAI can be incorporated into supporting the educational curriculum for assessments, teaching, and learning delivery. Furthermore, there is a need for additional interdisciplinary, multidimensional studies in HE through collaboration. This will strengthen the awareness and understanding of students, tutors, and other stakeholders, which will be instrumental in formulating guidelines, frameworks, and policies for GenAI usage.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models in detecting COVID-19-related misinformation on online social networks (OSNs), aiming to develop more effective tools for countering the spread of health misinformation during the pan-demic. The study trained and tested various ML classifiers (Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forest, etc.), DL models (CNN, LSTM, hybrid CNN+LSTM), and pretrained language models (DistilBERT, RoBERTa) on the "COVID19-FNIR DATASET." These models were evaluated for accuracy, F1 score, recall, precision, and ROC, and used preprocessing techniques like stemming and lemmatization. The results showed SVM performed well, achieving a 94.41% F1-score. DL models with Word2Vec embeddings exceeded 98% in all performance metrics (accuracy, F1 score, recall, precision & ROC). The CNN+LSTM hybrid models also exceeded 98% across performance metrics, outperforming pretrained models like DistilBERT and RoBERTa. Our study concludes that DL and hybrid DL models are more effective than conventional ML algorithms for detecting COVID-19 misinformation on OSNs. The findings highlight the importance of advanced neural network approaches and large-scale pretraining in misinformation detection. Future research should optimize these models for various misinformation types and adapt to changing OSNs, aiding in combating health misinformation.

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is probably the most disruptive global health disaster in recent history. It negatively impacted the whole world and virtually brought the global economy to a standstill. However, as the virus was spreading, infecting people and claiming thousands of lives so was the spread and propagation of fake news, misinformation and disinformation about the event. These included the spread of unconfirmed health advice and remedies on social media. In this paper, false information about the pandemic is identified using a content-based approach and metadata curated from messages posted to online social networks. A content-based approach combined with metadata as well as an initial feature analysis is used and then several supervised learning models are tested for identifying and predicting misleading posts. Our approach shows up to 93% accuracy in the detection of fake news related posts about the COVID-19 pandemic

Background Social media platforms such as Twitter are used increasingly to consume and share information, including health-related information. Previous research has analysed the obesity conversation on Twitter, but no work to date has explored content related to specific contributing health behaviours, such as physical activity, diet and weight loss. The aim of this study was to identify the content and source of physical activity, diet and weight loss information on Twitter, in order to identify common content and sources of these tweets. Methods Exploratory thematic and source analysis was conducted on tweets containing the words “physical activity”, “diet”, or “weight loss”, collected over a 7-day period in March 2017. Sources were coded as professional, non-professional, or information intermediaries (non-protected titles and potentially misleading terms, such as ‘personal trainer’). Tweets were coded as educational (news and research, guidelines and recommendations), or non-educational (promotional, conversational, behavioural, or directing to another platform). Results A 1% sample of tweets (n=1,433) was analysed. The majority of tweets (69.2%) were related to diet, and most tweets were non-educational in nature. Among non-educational tweets, promotion of products or services was the most commonly identified theme (33.4%). Educational tweets comprised just under a third of the sample, and most of these (96.8%; n=455) came from non-professionals or information intermediaries. Most of the educational tweets from a non-professional source (74.0%; n=296) were providing advice in the form of recommendations or guidelines. Only 1.3% of all tweets came from a professional source. Conclusions Only 3% of the educational information shared on Twitter regarding physical activity, diet and weight loss came from a professional source. This suggests that Twitter users are at high risk of receiving information from non-professional sources, which may include non-evidence-based information or potentially harmful misinformation.

Messages posted to online social networks (OSN) causes a recent stir due to the intended spread of fake news or rumor. This work aims to understand and analyse the characteristics of fake news especially in relation to sentiments, for the automatic detection of fake news and rumors. Based on empirical observations, we propose a hypothesis that there exists a relation between fake messages or rumours and sentiments of the texts posted online. We verify our hypothesis by comparing with the state-of-the-art baseline text-only fake news detection methods that do not consider sentiments. We performed experiments on standard Twitter fake news dataset and show good improvements in detecting fake news or rumor posts.

Inferring locations from user texts on social media platforms is a non-trivial and challenging problem relating to public safety. We propose a novel non-uniform grid-based approach for location inference from Twitter messages using Quadtree spatial partitions. The proposed algorithm uses natural language processing (NLP) for semantic understanding and incorporates Cosine similarity and Jaccard similarity measures for feature vector extraction and dimensionality reduction. We chose Twitter as our experimental social media platform due to its popularity and effectiveness for the dissemination of news and stories about recent events happening around the world. Our approach is the first of its kind to make location inference from tweets using Quadtree spatial partitions and NLP, in hybrid word-vector representations. The proposed algorithm achieved significant classification accuracy and outperformed state-of-the-art grid-based content-only location inference methods by up to 24% in correctly predicting tweet locations within a 161km radius and by 300km in median error distance on benchmark datasets.

The problem associated with the propagation of fake news continues to grow at an alarming scale. This trend has generated much interest from politics to academia and industry alike. We propose a framework that detects and classifies fake news messages from Twitter posts using hybrid of convolutional neural networks and long-short term recurrent neural network models. The proposed work using this deep learning approach achieves 82% accuracy. Our approach intuitively identifies relevant features associated with fake news stories without previous knowledge of the domain.

Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have been shown to function as effective social sensors that can "feel the pulse" of a community. The aim of the current study is to test the feasibility of designing, implementing and evaluating a bespoke social media-enabled intervention that can be effective for sharing and changing knowledge, attitudes and behaviours in meaningful ways to promote public health, specifically with regards to prevention of skin cancer. We present the design and implementation details of the campaign followed by summary findings and analysis.

The impact of social media and its growing association with the sharing of ideas and propagation of messages remains vital in everyday communication. Twitter is one effective platform for the dissemination of news and stories about recent events happening around the world. It has a continually growing database currently adopted by over 300 million users. In this paper we propose a novel grid-based approach employing supervised Multinomial Naive Bayes while extracting geographic entities from relevant user descriptions metadata which gives a spatial indication of the user location. To the best of our knowledge our approach is the first to make location inference from tweets using geo-enriched grid-based classification. Our approach performs better than existing baselines achieving more than 57% accuracy at city-level granularity. In addition we present a novel framework for content-based estimation of user locations by specifying levels of granularity required in pre-defined location grids.

BACKGROUND:Social media public health campaigns have the advantage of tailored messaging at low cost and large reach, but little is known about what would determine their feasibility as tools for inducing attitude and behavior change. OBJECTIVE:The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of designing, implementing, and evaluating a social media-enabled intervention for skin cancer prevention. METHODS:A quasi-experimental feasibility study used social media (Twitter) to disseminate different message "frames" related to care in the sun and cancer prevention. Phase 1 utilized the Northern Ireland cancer charity's Twitter platform (May 1 to July 14, 2015). Following a 2-week "washout" period, Phase 2 commenced (August 1 to September 30, 2015) using a bespoke Twitter platform. Phase 2 also included a Thunderclap, whereby users allowed their social media accounts to automatically post a bespoke message on their behalf. Message frames were categorized into 5 broad categories: humor, shock or disgust, informative, personal stories, and opportunistic. Seed users with a notable following were contacted to be "influencers" in retweeting campaign content. A pre- and postintervention Web-based survey recorded skin cancer prevention knowledge and attitudes in Northern Ireland (population 1.8 million). RESULTS:There were a total of 417,678 tweet impressions, 11,213 engagements, and 1211 retweets related to our campaign. Shocking messages generated the greatest impressions (shock, n=2369; informative, n=2258; humorous, n=1458; story, n=1680), whereas humorous messages generated greater engagement (humorous, n=148; shock, n=147; story, n=117; informative, n=100) and greater engagement rates compared with story tweets. Informative messages, resulted in the greatest number of shares (informative, n=17; humorous, n=10; shock, n=9; story, n=7). The study findings included improved knowledge of skin cancer severity in a pre- and postintervention Web-based survey, with greater awareness that skin cancer is the most common form of cancer (preintervention: 28.4% [95/335] vs postintervention: 39.3% [168/428] answered "True") and that melanoma is most serious (49.1% [165/336] vs 55.5% [238/429]). The results also show improved attitudes toward ultraviolet (UV) exposure and skin cancer with a reduction in agreement that respondents "like to tan" (60.5% [202/334] vs 55.6% [238/428]). CONCLUSIONS:Social media-disseminated public health messages reached more than 23% of the Northern Ireland population. A Web-based survey suggested that the campaign might have contributed to improved knowledge and attitudes toward skin cancer among the target population. Findings suggested that shocking and humorous messages generated greatest impressions and engagement, but information-based messages were likely to be shared most. The extent of behavioral change as a result of the campaign remains to be explored, however, the change of attitudes and knowledge is promising. Social media is an inexpensive, effective method for delivering public health messages. However, existing and traditional process evaluation methods may not be suitable for social media.