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Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites

BACKGROUND: The Internet has provided great opportunities for disseminating both accurate and inaccurate health information. Therefore, the quality of information is considered as a widespread concern affecting the human life. Despite the increasingly substantial growth in the number of users, Persi...

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Autores principales: Samadbeik, Mahnaz, Ahmadi, Maryam, Mohammadi, Ali, Mohseni Saravi, Beniamin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Kowsar 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4028768/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24910795
http://dx.doi.org/10.5812/ircmj.12866
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author Samadbeik, Mahnaz
Ahmadi, Maryam
Mohammadi, Ali
Mohseni Saravi, Beniamin
author_facet Samadbeik, Mahnaz
Ahmadi, Maryam
Mohammadi, Ali
Mohseni Saravi, Beniamin
author_sort Samadbeik, Mahnaz
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The Internet has provided great opportunities for disseminating both accurate and inaccurate health information. Therefore, the quality of information is considered as a widespread concern affecting the human life. Despite the increasingly substantial growth in the number of users, Persian health websites and the proportion of internet-using patients, little is known about the quality of Persian medical and health websites. OBJECTIVES: The current study aimed to first assess the quality, popularity and importance of websites providing Persian health-related information, and second to evaluate the correlation of the popularity and importance ranking with quality score on the Internet. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The sample websites were identified by entering the health-related keywords into four most popular search engines of Iranian users based on the Alexa ranking at the time of study. Each selected website was assessed using three qualified tools including the Bomba and Land Index, Google PageRank and the Alexa ranking. RESULTS: The evaluated sites characteristics (ownership structure, database, scope and objective) really did not have an effect on the Alexa traffic global rank, Alexa traffic rank in Iran, Google PageRank and Bomba total score. Most websites (78.9 percent, n = 56) were in the moderate category (8 ≤ x ≤ 11.99) based on their quality levels. There was no statistically significant association between Google PageRank with Bomba index variables and Alexa traffic global rank (P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The Persian health websites had better Bomba quality scores in availability and usability guidelines as compared to other guidelines. The Google PageRank did not properly reflect the real quality of evaluated websites and Internet users seeking online health information should not merely rely on it for any kind of prejudgment regarding Persian health websites. However, they can use Iran Alexa rank as a primary filtering tool of these websites. Therefore, designing search engines dedicated to explore accredited Persian health-related Web sites can be an effective method to access high-quality Persian health websites.
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spelling pubmed-40287682014-06-06 Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites Samadbeik, Mahnaz Ahmadi, Maryam Mohammadi, Ali Mohseni Saravi, Beniamin Iran Red Crescent Med J Research Article BACKGROUND: The Internet has provided great opportunities for disseminating both accurate and inaccurate health information. Therefore, the quality of information is considered as a widespread concern affecting the human life. Despite the increasingly substantial growth in the number of users, Persian health websites and the proportion of internet-using patients, little is known about the quality of Persian medical and health websites. OBJECTIVES: The current study aimed to first assess the quality, popularity and importance of websites providing Persian health-related information, and second to evaluate the correlation of the popularity and importance ranking with quality score on the Internet. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The sample websites were identified by entering the health-related keywords into four most popular search engines of Iranian users based on the Alexa ranking at the time of study. Each selected website was assessed using three qualified tools including the Bomba and Land Index, Google PageRank and the Alexa ranking. RESULTS: The evaluated sites characteristics (ownership structure, database, scope and objective) really did not have an effect on the Alexa traffic global rank, Alexa traffic rank in Iran, Google PageRank and Bomba total score. Most websites (78.9 percent, n = 56) were in the moderate category (8 ≤ x ≤ 11.99) based on their quality levels. There was no statistically significant association between Google PageRank with Bomba index variables and Alexa traffic global rank (P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The Persian health websites had better Bomba quality scores in availability and usability guidelines as compared to other guidelines. The Google PageRank did not properly reflect the real quality of evaluated websites and Internet users seeking online health information should not merely rely on it for any kind of prejudgment regarding Persian health websites. However, they can use Iran Alexa rank as a primary filtering tool of these websites. Therefore, designing search engines dedicated to explore accredited Persian health-related Web sites can be an effective method to access high-quality Persian health websites. Kowsar 2014-04-05 2014-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4028768/ /pubmed/24910795 http://dx.doi.org/10.5812/ircmj.12866 Text en Copyright © 2014, Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal; Published by Kowsar Corp. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Samadbeik, Mahnaz
Ahmadi, Maryam
Mohammadi, Ali
Mohseni Saravi, Beniamin
Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title_full Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title_fullStr Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title_full_unstemmed Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title_short Health Information on Internet: Quality, Importance, and Popularity of Persian Health Websites
title_sort health information on internet: quality, importance, and popularity of persian health websites
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4028768/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24910795
http://dx.doi.org/10.5812/ircmj.12866
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