Explore our sister journals here.

Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research

Date Submitted: Dec 5, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 5, 2017 - Jan 4, 2018
Date Accepted: Feb 25, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Quality of Web Information About Palliative Care on Websites from the United States and Japan: Comparative Evaluation Study

Tanabe K, Fujiwara K, Ogura H, Yasuda H, Goto N, Ohtsu F

Quality of Web Information About Palliative Care on Websites from the United States and Japan: Comparative Evaluation Study

Interact J Med Res 2018;7(1):e7

DOI: 10.2196/ijmr.9574

PMID: 29615388

PMCID: 5904447

Quality of Web Information About Palliative Care on Websites from the United States and Japan: Comparative Evaluation Study

  • Kouichi Tanabe; 
  • Kaho Fujiwara; 
  • Hana Ogura; 
  • Hatsuna Yasuda; 
  • Nobuyuki Goto; 
  • Fumiko Ohtsu

ABSTRACT

Background:

Patients and their families are able to obtain information about palliative care from websites easily nowadays. However, there are concerns on the accuracy of information on the Web and how up to date it is.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to elucidate problematic points of medical information about palliative care obtained from websites, and to compare the quality of the information between Japanese and US websites.

Methods:

We searched Google Japan and Google USA for websites relating to palliative care. We then evaluated the top 50 websites from each search using the DISCERN and LIDA instruments.

Results:

We found that Japanese websites were given a lower evaluation of reliability than US websites. In 3 LIDA instrument subcategories—engagability (P<.001), currency (P=.001), and content production procedure (P<.001)—US websites scored significantly higher and had large effect sizes.

Conclusions:

Our results suggest that Japanese websites have problems with the frequency with which they are updated, their update procedures and policies, and the scrutiny process the evidence must undergo. Additionally, there was a weak association between search ranking and reliability, and simultaneously we found that reliability could not be assessed by search ranking alone.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Tanabe K, Fujiwara K, Ogura H, Yasuda H, Goto N, Ohtsu F

Quality of Web Information About Palliative Care on Websites from the United States and Japan: Comparative Evaluation Study

Interact J Med Res 2018;7(1):e7

DOI: 10.2196/ijmr.9574

PMID: 29615388

PMCID: 5904447

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© 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.