[Internet and occupational dermatology. Quality criteria and useful links]

The World Wide Web (WWW) offers physicians as well as their patients a huge resource of health information, which can be attained within minutes. Nevertheless it is difficult to select the needed information out of the mass of provided data and their quality is often poor with many unproven statements. Occupational dermatologists can especially benefit from the internet as they need a wide range of data from many sources. Much of this data can already be obtained via internet. To facilitate their search for information, this article presents a selection of German websites. The quality of the websites has been assessed using criteria such as design, search function, provided links and medical information. The results revealed deficiencies in the transparency of the data, e.g. often it is not apparent who is responsible for the information or when they were updated.