BMJ 2001;322:1366 ( 2 June )

Letters

Quality of health information about depression on internet

    Study's shortcomings may have affected findings
    Level of evidence should be gold standard
    Authors' reply

Study's shortcomings may have affected findings

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Griffiths and Christensen evaluated the quality of web based information on the treatment of depression.1 Although they have tried to scrutinise the quality of a select group of websites, there are shortcomings in their methods that may have affected their findings.

Griffiths and Christensen used just one search engine (DirectHit) and one meta-search engine (MetaCrawler), which limited the comprehensiveness of their search. Although the popularity of search engines changes rapidly, we question the choice of DirectHit over more often used engines such as AltaVista or Google.2 Therefore, it is difficult to justify the assumption of Griffiths and Christensen that their search method provided the best available approximation to a list of depression sites.

We also question the strategy of using the single search term of "depression," given that over 44% of internet users search using multiple keywords.3 The extreme narrowness of using a single keyword search was summed . . . [Full text of this article]
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This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Wilson, P., Risk, A. (2002). How to find the good and avoid the bad or ugly: a short guide to tools for rating quality of health information on the internet * Commentary: On the way to quality. BMJ 324: 598-602 [Full text]  
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Rapid Responses:

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Internet resources: First, accessibility.
Candido Hernandez-Lopez
bmj.com, 1 Jun 2001 [Full text]
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