Pediatric Urology and the Internet—Does an Uncommon Topic Decrease Content Quality?

Abstract

Web sites devoted to common pediatric urology topics have higher quality information for disease diagnosis and natural history. Otherwise, the quality of pediatric urology information on the Internet is high for common and uncommon topics. A high reading level is required to use these resources.

Analysis of Readability and Quality of Web Pages Addressing both Common and Uncommon Topics in Pediatric Surgery

“…The website owners undertake to honor or exceed the legal requirements of medical/health information privacy that apply in the country and state where the website and mirror sites are located. 4 Where appropriate, information contained on this site will be supported by clear references to source data and, where possible, have specific HTML links to that data. The date when a clinical page was last modified will be clearly displayed (e.g., at the bottom of the page).…”

“…Current market data overwhelmingly show that Google is the most commonly used search engine (61.9% of all Internet searches in July 2008), and that less than a third of all Web searches proceeds beyond the first page of search, we decided to limit our results to the first page of a Google search. 4 The first page, containing 10 addresses, for each condition was evaluated for a total of 80 websites (40 for each group). Websites in PDF format, chat, or link to PubMed abstracts were excluded.…”

“…4 The FRE score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a lower level of reading needed for comprehension of the text. The FKG level translates this score into the United States grade level, ranging from 0 to 12, with scores higher than 12 indicating total years of education required to comprehend the text adequately.…”

“…Although many attempts have been made to assess, control, and assure the quality of Web-based medical information, there is no single standard strategy for evaluating and this may represents a real problem especially for nonprofessional users such as patients, parents, or relatives. 4 The Web is truly an international press and is essentially unregulated. Several attempts of evaluation for healthrelated Internet Web pages have been made but authors focused their attention on results, not on its evolution over time.…”

Online hypospadias support group data analysis

“…Validity and quality of information on the Internet may be limited [23]. However, Routh et al assessed that the quality of information on pediatric urology gained from the Internet is of good quality, although a high intellectual capacity is needed to understand the content of the majority of Web pages [24]. Further studies are needed evaluating the quality of information gained through OSG [8,14,25].…”