Accuracy of information on apparently credible websites: survey of five common health topics.

involved in the conception and design of the study, collection of data on links, interpretation of data, and drafting of the paper. NQM carried out the statistical analysis. KKH, FCA, MIR, HMK, and REP were involved in interpreting the data and revised the paper for intellectual content. MAM and SES advised on methods and revised the paper for intellectual content. FM and EVB are the guarantors. Utilization of the internet by oncology patients to obtain cancer related information. Use of inter-net and other information resources among adult cancer patients and their companions. assuring the quality of medical information on the internet: Caveant lec-tor et viewor—let the reader and viewer beware [editorial] [see comments]. 10 Shon J, Musen MA. The low availability of metadata elements for evaluating the quality of medical information on the world wide web. Is the internet a reliable and useful resource for patients and oncology professionals: a randomized evaluation of breast cancer information. The internet provides an easily accessible forum to disseminate both accurate and inaccurate health information—so it has the potential to facilitate but also to jeopardise healthcare provision. 1 2 Many criteria have been alleged to capture the quality of health web-sites, 3 4 but the validity of these criteria needs to be examined. 5 The source, currency, and hierarchy of the evidence posted on a website may be used to judge its credibility—that is, the power of inspiring belief. If these criteria were fulfilled, the contents of the website would be expected to be accurate. We determined whether websites that seem to be credible provide accurate health information. We determined the relation between credibility features and accuracy of contents of 121 websites that provided information on five common health topics: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (23 sites), ankle sprain (36), emergency contraception (32), menor-rhagia (9), and female sterilisation (21). These sites were identified either by searching each of the most commonly used engines (such as Altavista, Excite, Hot-bot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, Webcrawler) or by simultaneously consulting them using a meta-search engine, Copernic 4.1 (www.copernic.com/). We selected English language websites whose content provided information about the topics. Website selection and data extractions were performed in duplicate, and agreement between the two assessors was high. The entire contents of the selected websites were assessed for three credibility features (source, currency, and evidence hierarchy) and accuracy of contents. Source and currency are widely used to assess scientific …