European Association For Health Information and Libraries
Abstract
Due to the uncontrolled spread of new biomedical Web Sites, it becomes essential for the scientific community to make possible the evaluation of the quality and reliance of the online information repository content.
The Internet, so far, undoubtedly represents a democratic and free accessible information system, it gives the same importance to everyone who has something to communicate, share or just sell, without any distinction between scientifically sound resources and the others.
Often computer graphics and free access are guaranteed but not the information content: texts are not certificated and no references are furnished.
In most of the cases it is impossible to know the authors, the issues, the bibliographical references, and the updating frequence as well.
This also happens even in Web Sites usually read by doctors, researchers (or even patients) that need to know how to approach to serious topics, such as diseases, new therapies or pharmacological treatments.
At the moment, just a few examples of organizations devoted to the Web site certification are avaliable. One of them is the HON Fondation which, after the evaluation of some basic caracteristics of the Wed site, gives "quality marks" stating if it can be considered as an affordable information source.
From this standpoint this paper has the aim to develop a methodology in order to evaluate the scientific quality of the Web sites in biomedical area (human and animal health). This methodology was setted up through a qualitative analysis of web sites of the main Italian Scientific Societies and Associations.
After the selection of the web resources through a research carried out on the most important net spiders (Scirus, Google, Altavista), each site was analyzed through an "Evaluation Questionnaire1" based on the criteria
previously adopted by scientific organizations such as HON, DISCERN, and IZSUM.
Results have been interpreted and discussed
