Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Feb 1, 2020
Date Accepted: May 14, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 17, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Wikipedia medical student: Comparing the quality of vascular surgery topics across two commonly used educational resources
ABSTRACT
Background:
Medical students commonly refer to Wikipedia.org as their preferred online resource for medical information. To date, the quality and readability of common vascular disorders on Wikipedia has not been evaluated or compared against a standard textbook of surgery.
Objective:
The aims of the study are to: (1) Assess the quality of the respective Wikipedia.org articles against the equivalent chapters in a standard textbook of surgery at the medical school level; (2) Identify any errors of omission in either resource; (3) Compare the readability of both resources using validated ease-of-reading and grade-level tools
Methods:
Eight fundamental topics in vascular surgery were taken from the Medical Council of Canada’s Objectives of the Qualification Examination and were analyzed in this study. The respective articles were accessed, in English, from Wikipedia.org through its native search engine using; equivalent chapters from Schwartz Principles of Surgery 9th edition were marked. Quality was evaluated using the DISCERN tool, errors of omission were evaluated using a proprietary scoring system designed by the author(s), and readability was evaluated using the Flesch Reading Ease test, Gunning-fog score, Coleman-Liau Index, SMOG Index, automated Readability Index, and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.
Results:
Schwartz Principles of Surgery 9th ed. scored highest in quality with perfect DISCERN scores of 5 and had the lowest errors of omission, while Wikipedia.org scored best for readability being, on average, understandable by most Grade 12 educated students. Inter-observer concordances validate these results.
Conclusions:
Schwartz Principles of Surgery 9th ed. is superior to Wikipedia.org when critiquing quality, and errors of omission, while Wikipedia.org is superior to the textbook when considering the ease of reading. This study recommends the use of surgical textbooks as a primary source of learning material for medical students in their clerkship years, and cautions the use of Wikipedia.org due to its significant rate of omissions.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.