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Evaluation of information quality on the internet for periodontal disease patients
Author(s) -
Kanmaz Burcu,
Buduneli Nurcan
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
oral diseases
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.953
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1601-0825
pISSN - 1354-523X
DOI - 10.1111/odi.13546
Subject(s) - the internet , certification , medicine , web site , world wide web , attribution , quality (philosophy) , information quality , health information , web page , computer science , information retrieval , psychology , health care , information system , engineering , political science , social psychology , philosophy , electrical engineering , epistemology , law
Objective To evaluate the quality of accessible information on periodontal diseases on the Internet using different scales. Materials and Methods A search was performed using the Google search engine with questions about periodontal disease symptoms. The first 30 web sites obtained after searching for each question were evaluated. Duplicate web sites, advertisements, discussion groups, links to research articles, videos, and images were excluded. A total of 90 web sites were included and evaluated with Health on the Net Code of Conduct Certification (HONCode) presence, Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmarks, and the quality criteria for consumer health information (DISCERN) toolkit. Results Only 27.8% of the analyzed web sites contain HONCode certificates. No webpages fulfilled all JAMA criteria, whereas 32.2% of the web sites did not provide any of them. Majority of the web sites’ (44.4%) overall rating score was 2 with the DISCERN instrument. In the DISCERN Section Scores comparison between various types of web sites, information web site scores were higher than Dental Health Center Web sites in Section 1 and Section 3 scores ( p = .000 and p = .001, respectively). Conclusion Overall quality of periodontal information based on patients’ questions on the Internet has serious shortcomings especially in terms of attribution and the quality of information on treatment choices.