Assessing the relative quality of anesthesiology and critical care medicine Internet mailing lists.

UNLABELLED: We studied the relative quality of a subset of anesthesiology and critical care medicine Internet mailing lists regarding the publishing capacity of their members to compare them with the major journals and conferences regarding these specialties. Using systematic searches on MEDLINE and according to the Science Citation Index 1995, we investigated the impact factor of mailing list subscribers, of the first authors of the selected articles, and of the first authors of published abstracts from conferences. We studied six mailing lists, seven journals, and four conferences. Journals and conferences showed a higher percentage of published authors and higher average impact factor among their first authors than the mailing lists did per subscriber. However, when only the subset of publishing authors from the three media was considered, no significant differences were found. We conclude that qualified authors may be found among the subscribers of Internet medical mailing lists on anesthesiology and critical care medicine. These professional discussion groups could complement peer-reviewed publications and conferences in professional information exchange and continuing medical education. IMPLICATIONS: Internet publishing is not governed by rules that assure certain basic quality standards. Methods for assessing these standards are needed. We compared discussion groups with medical journals and conferences on anesthesiology and critical care medicine by calculating the impact factor of their members and first authors, respectively. Our study shows that qualified authors may be found in all three media.

Can examination of WWW usage statistics and other indirect quality indicators distinguish the relative quality of medical web sites?

BACKGROUND: The Internet offers a great amount of health related websites, but concern has been raised about their reliability. Several subjective evaluation criteria and websites rating systems have been proposed as a help for the Internet users to distinguish among web resources with different quality, but their efficacy has not been proven. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the agreement of a subset of Internet rating systems editorial boards regarding their evaluations of a sample of pediatric websites. To evaluate certain websites characteristics as possible quality indicators for pediatric websites. METHODS: Comparative survey of the Results of systematic evaluations of the contents and formal aspects of a sample of pediatric websites, with the number of daily visits to those websites, the time since their last update, the impact factor of their authors or editors, and the number of websites linked to them. RESULTS: 363 websites were compiled from eight rating systems. Only 25 were indexed and evaluated by at least two rating systems. This subset included more updated and more linked websites. There was no correlation among the Results of the evaluation of these 25 websites by the rating systems. The number of inbound links to the websites significantly correlated with their updating frequency (p<.001), with the number of daily visits (p=.005), and with the Results of their evaluation by the largest rating system, HealthAtoZ (p<.001). The websites updating frequency also significantly correlated with the RESULTS of the websites evaluation by HealthAtoZ, both about their contents (p=.001) and their total values (p<.05). The number of daily visits significantly correlated (p<.05) with the Results of the evaluations by Medical Matrix. CONCLUSIONS: Some websites characteristics as the number of daily visits, their updating frequency and, overall, the number of websites linked to them, correlate with their evaluation by some of the largest rating systems on the Internet, what means that certain indexes obtained from the usage analysis of pediatric websites could be used as quality indicators. On the other hand, the citation analysis on the Web by the quantification of inbound links to medical websites could be an objective and feasible tool in rating great amounts of websites.