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A new generation of tools for search, recovery and quality evaluation of World Wide Web medical resources

A new generation of tools for search, recovery and quality evaluation of World Wide Web medical... Although the Internet is already a valuable information resource in medicine, there are important challenges to be faced before physicians and general users will have extensive access to this information. As a result of a research effort to compile a health‐related Internet directory, new tools and strategies have been developed to solve key problems derived from the explosive growth of medical information on the Net and the great concern over the quality of such critical information. The current Internet search engines lack some important capabilities. We suggest using second generation tools (client‐side based) able to deal with large quantities of data and to increase the usability of the records recovered. We tested the capabilities of these programs to solve health‐related information problems, recognising six groups according to the kind of topics addressed: Z39.50 clients, downloaders, multisearchers, tracing agents, indexers and mappers. The evaluation of the quality of health information available on the Internet could require a large amount of human effort. A possible solution may be to use quantitative indicators based on the hypertext visibility of the Web sites. The cybermetric measures are valid for quality evaluation if they are derived from indirect peer review by experts with Web pages citing the site. The hypertext links acting as citations need to be extracted from a controlled sample of quality super‐sites. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Online Information Review Emerald Publishing

A new generation of tools for search, recovery and quality evaluation of World Wide Web medical resources

Isidro Aguillo
Online Information Review , Volume 24 (2): 6 – Apr 1, 2000
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References (9)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 MCB UP Ltd. All rights reserved.
ISSN
1468-4527
DOI
10.1108/14684520010330319
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Although the Internet is already a valuable information resource in medicine, there are important challenges to be faced before physicians and general users will have extensive access to this information. As a result of a research effort to compile a health‐related Internet directory, new tools and strategies have been developed to solve key problems derived from the explosive growth of medical information on the Net and the great concern over the quality of such critical information. The current Internet search engines lack some important capabilities. We suggest using second generation tools (client‐side based) able to deal with large quantities of data and to increase the usability of the records recovered. We tested the capabilities of these programs to solve health‐related information problems, recognising six groups according to the kind of topics addressed: Z39.50 clients, downloaders, multisearchers, tracing agents, indexers and mappers. The evaluation of the quality of health information available on the Internet could require a large amount of human effort. A possible solution may be to use quantitative indicators based on the hypertext visibility of the Web sites. The cybermetric measures are valid for quality evaluation if they are derived from indirect peer review by experts with Web pages citing the site. The hypertext links acting as citations need to be extracted from a controlled sample of quality super‐sites.

Journal

Online Information Review – Emerald Publishing

Published: Apr 1, 2000

Keywords: Information retrieval; Internet; Health care; Information services; Quality control; Evaluation

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