CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 461Health Literacy and Information AccessibilityMisinformation and Its ImpactsInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior

The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year; 24 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Towards quality management of medical information on the internet: evaluation, labelling, and filtering of informationHallmarks for quality of informationQuality on the internetAssuring quality and relevance of internet information in the real world

Open access
Eysenbach, Gunther, Gray, J A Muir, Bonati, Maurizio, Arunachalam, Subbiah, Diepgen, Thomas L, Impicciatore, Piero, Pandolfini, Chiara·1998·BMJ
DOI 10.1136/bmj.317.7171.1496PMC PMC1114339
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

# Towards quality management of medical information on the internet: evaluation, labelling, and filtering of information {#article-title-2} The principal dilemma of the internet is that, while its anarchic nature is desirable for fostering open debate without censorship, this raises questions about the quality of information available, which could inhibit its usefulness. While the internet allows “medical minority interest groups to access information of critical interest to them so that morbidity in these rare conditions can be lessened,”1 it also gives quacks such as the “cancer healer” Ryke Geerd Hamer a platform (http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/3374/index.htm).2–4 Quality is defined as “the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs.”5 For quality to be evaluated, these needs have to be defined and translated into a set of quantitatively or qualitatively stated requirements for the characteristics of an entity that reflect the stated and implied needs. So how can we define consumers' “needs” in the case of medical information on the internet? The quality of medical information is particularly important because misinformation could be a matter of life or death.6 Thus, studies investigating the “quality of medical information” on the various internet venues—websites,7 mailing lists and newsgroups, 8 9 and in email communication between patients and doctors10—are mostly driven by the concern of possible endangerment for patients by low quality medical information. Thus, quality control measures should aim for the Hippocratic injunction “first, do no harm.” Most papers published so far about the problem of quality of medical internet information focus on assessing reliability, but, as box 1 shows, this should be only one aspect of quality measures aiming for “first, do no harm.” Another should be to provide context. Although these two problems are different in nature and different measures may be proposed to solve them, we discuss a common measure that could … Correspondence to: Dr Bonati

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/bmj.317.7171.1496

Cites

24 of 24 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 26 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Nigel, 1997, German “quack healer” arrested [news]., Lancet, 349, 1679, 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)62658-X · DOI
  2. 10.1001/jama.1997.03540390074039 · DOI
  3. Krauskopf, 1996, Label syntax and communi-cation protocols., World Wide Web J, 1, 45
  4. Miller, 1996, Rating services and rating systems (and their machine-readable descriptions)., World Wide Web J, 1, 23
  5. Gray JAM .Evidence-based healthcare. London:Churchill Livingstone,1997. · DOI
  6. Wyatt, 1997, Commentary: measuring quality and impact of the world wide web., BMJ, 314, 1879, 10.1136/bmj.314.7098.1879 · DOI
  7. Impicciatore, 1997, Reliability of health information for the public on the world wide web: systematic survey of advice on managing fever in children at home., BMJ, 314, 1875, 10.1136/bmj.314.7098.1875 · DOI
  8. Jadad, 1998, Rating health information on the internet., Navigating to knowledge or to Babel? JAMA, 279, 611

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 401–458 of 458

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Eysenbach, G., Gray, J. A. M., Bonati, M., Arunachalam, S., Diepgen, T. L., Impicciatore, P., & Pandolfini, C.
Affiliations
Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research (IT)
ORCID
Venue
BMJ
Publisher
BMJ
Published
1998-11-28
Volume
317
Issue
7171
Pages
1496-1502
ISSN
  • 0007-1447 (ISSN-L)
  • 0959-8138
  • 1468-5833
DOI
10.1136/bmj.317.7171.1496
PMC
PMC1114339
OpenAlex
W2080271974
Cited by
461
References
26
Citations by year
2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 18 · 2012: 13
FWCI
10.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.bmj.com/company/legal-information/terms-conditions/legal-information/tdm-licencepolicy (tdm)
Locations
  • BMJ (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
  • DigitalGeorgetown (Georgetown University Library) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Keywords
online health information, quality management, information evaluation, information filtering, misinformation, reliability, context, patient safety, online health information sources
MeSH terms
Medical Informatics, Quality Control, Reference Standards, Information Storage and Retrieval, Internet

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review