Verifiable Health Information on the Internet
Martin
Frické, Associate Professor, School of Information Resources
and Library Science, University of Arizona, 1515 East First Street, Tucson,
AZ 85719, USA. Email: mfricke@u.arizona.edu
Don
Fallis, Assistant Professor, School of Information Resources and Library
Science, University of Arizona, Email: fallis@u.arizona.edu
Keywords
Consumer health information, accuracy of information, information on the
Internet, quality of information.
Abstract
The Internet has become an important source of health information.
However, several empirical studies indicate that there is a significant
amount of inaccurate health information on the Internet. Thus, it
is important that Internet users be able to distinguish the accurate information
from the inaccurate information. Information professionals have developed
checklists for evaluating the quality of health information to assist Internet
users in this regard. However, such checklists can only be effective
if the proposed indicators of accuracy really do indicate accuracy.
This article reports on two empirical studies that implement an effective
technique for identifying such indicators of accuracy. In particular,
one of these studies indicates that the HONcode
logo is more likely to be displayed on web sites that contain accurate
health information. However, many commonly proposed indicators of
accuracy (e.g., the author having medical credentials, currency, lack of
advertising) were not found to be correlated with accuracy.
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