Evaluating health information sites on the Internet in Korea: a cross-sectional survey

Through the internet the public in South Korea has access to a growing supply of information on health and disease. In South Korea an estimated 13.93 million people used the internet in 2000. The number has increased rapidly compared to 1.63 million in 1997. Health information is often said to be one of the most retrieved types of information on the internet. However, a concern has emerged for the quality of health information documents contained on the World Wide Web. Lack of evaluation and oversight, and ease of publication, have led to inaccurate and misleading health-related publications on the Internet. For those seeking easy ways to identify high-quality and reliable information, rating systems to evaluate the quality of health information on the internet should be provided and developed. Given this background, the purpose of this research was to evaluate health information web sites on the internet. In this study we aimed to survey websites providing health information. 440 websites were selected using four search engines, YahooKorea (http://www.yahoo.co.kr), LycosKorea (http://www.lycos.co.kr), Empas (http://www.empas.co.kr), and Naver (http://www.naver.com), to conduct searches in December 2000. General quality criteria were used for the evaluation. These included ownership, currency, authorship, source, feedback mechanism, links, and functionality. More than 50% of web sites did not provide the date of publication or update of information, author and author credentials, references to source, etc. Websites of universities and universities' hospitals were more likely to provide name and type of provider (p < .01), author's name (p < .001), and references to source (p < .01) than other service providers. There is a need for better evidence-based health information as well as a need to develop simple criteria that ordinary people can understand and use. In addition, gateway services that operate a selective process and provide links to other organizations that provide high-quality health information should be offered and developed.