BMJ 2002;324:581-582 ( 9 March )

Papers

Accuracy of information on apparently credible websites: survey of five common health topics

Heinke Kunst, specialist registrar ^a, Diederik Groot, medical student ^b, Pallavi M Latthe, specialist registrar ^c, Manish Latthe, general practitioner ^d, Khalid S Khan, consultant, education resource centre ^c. 

^a Department of Respiratory Medicine, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1NY, ^b Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands, ^c Birmingham Women's Health Care NHS Trust, Birmingham B15 2TG, ^d Tower Hill Medical Centre, Birmingham B42 1LJ

Correspondence to: K S Khan k.s.khan@bham.ac.uk

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

The internet provides an easily accessible forum to disseminate both accurate and inaccurate health informationso it has the potential to facilitate but also to jeopardise healthcare provision. ^{1 2} Many criteria have been alleged to capture the quality of health websites, ^{3 4} but the validity of these criteria needs to be examined.⁵ The source, currency, and hierarchy of the evidence posted on a website may be used to judge its credibilitythat is, the power of inspiring belief. If these criteria were fulfilled, the contents of the website would be expected to be accurate. We determined whether websites that seem to be credible provide accurate health information.

	Methods and results

We determined the relation between credibility features and accuracy of contents of 121 websites that provided information on five common health topics: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (23 sites), ankle sprain (36), emergency contraception (32), menorrhagia (9), and female sterilisation (21). These sites were identified either by searching . . . [Full text of this article]

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