JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) affect people’s quality of life greatly, and the precise understanding of TMDs contributes to a proper treatment choice. Social media, is one of the most fundamental and efficient ways for patients to receive related information, hence there is an urgent need to evaluate the quality of information related to TMDs on social medias.

Objective:

This research aims to assess the quality of information about TMDs on two mainstream social media platforms, WeChat and Zhihu, as sources of medical information. They will be evaluated from three aspects: credibility, concreteness, and accuracy.

Methods:

Researchers searched for articles about TMDs on WeChat and Zhihu and selected the samples. The DISCERN instrument was adopted to grade the credibility and concreteness of these articles and divided them into five groups according to their scores: excellent (score>63), good (62.5>score>51), fair (50.5>score>39), poor (38.5>score>27) and very poor(score<26.5). The accuracy was tested against authoritative journals and textbooks. The HONcode and Global Quality Scale (GQS) were used as supplemental tools. Two researchers conducted this process independently, and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to examine the consistency between the two researchers.

Results:

After selection, 80 articles were selected at all, including 26 articles from WeChat and 54 articles from Zhihu. The DISCERN instrument reported a mean score of 39.79 (SD 6.11) out of 80. No article got more than 63 points, and most of the samples got less than 50 points. Articles on WeChat and Zhihu did not perform well for credibility and concreteness, and the overall mean score was 22.63 out of 40 (SD 3.24) and 14.23 out of 35 (SD 3.85) respectively. As for accuracy, the results demonstrated that the two platforms did well in this area. Most articles (70 of 80) got 3.5 and 3.5 plus out of 5 in case of accuracy. HONcode reported a mean score of 6.04 out of 16 (SD 1.16) while GQS showed a mean score of 2.93 out of 5 (SD 0.54), indicating the reliability should be improved, and these articles can only provide limited help to the patients.

Conclusions:

The quality of TMD-related information from WeChat and Zhihu is generally low, although they do well on accuracy. Users of these information should not ignore that the credibility and concreteness still need further improvements. For uploaders, they should pay more attention to the regulations when writing such articles, like attaching a list of reference. As for the platforms, improvements like less advertisement and more supervision will contribute greatly to users’ experience.