Information Quality

Citmed

System of ranking of medical web resources based on objective criteria.

Catalogues of Internet resources in healthcare mostly lack the quality evaluation. This fact makes orientation in actual information explosion difficult. In the Institute of Medical Informatics 2nd Medical Faculty, Charles University in Prague a list of web documents focused on educational resources in health care was created. The main criterion for adding a resource to the list was a high link popularity (number of web link) of the resource. Another marker of quality taken into consideration in the selection process was inclusion of the resource in one the following databases: HON, HardinMD, Medical Matrix. The system operates automatically; a team of editors then edits the results. The output is a list of web resources provided with markers of quality and link popularity history.

Rules of evaluation:

The link popularity (internet citations) is the objective ranking criterion used in Citmed database. It is generated as the sum of all web links to the given resource (e.g. the interest expressed by other authors). The features of this parameter proceed from following attributes, evaluated in standard conditions:

evaluation of all links to given resource (in scope of whole Internet)
evaluation of standard link query (database of searching engine AlltheWeb.com)
exclusion of self citation (links to given document in the same resource)
exclusion of advantage of "long history" of resource (evaluation for last 1 years excludes the higher evaluation of traditional resources compared with the new ones)

Rankmed

System Rankmed, a project supported by Ministry of Health is automated system for evaluation of health web resources. It facilitates a comparison of web pages of different health-related institutions based on a quality of presentation of information.

The web resources are evaluated through 20 criteria. The choice of the particular criteria was based on standard and guidelines of electronic information.

20 criteria were chosen from international standards for evaluation of web pages :

Ranking of hospitals according to the web pages quality (=presentation of information).

Presentation
1. Speed of loading (speed of loading of the homepage)
2. Number of inner links (number of links from the homepage)
3. Covering of the screen (overlapping of the content of the page out of the screen is a negative feature)
4. Uniformity of appearance (evaluation whether the pages of the particular site have the same structure and appearance)
5. Faults of graphics (character size and contrast of the text and background were evaluated)
Navigation
1. Number of steps (number of „clicks“ needed to reach defined information)
2. Back links (presence of back links to the homepage)
3. Site map (presence of site map)
4. Marking of new (clear identification of new information)
5. Highlighting of links (evaluation whether the links are clearly distinguishable from other text)
Functions
1. Foreign language version (presence and extent of foreign language version of presented information)
2. Internal search engine (presence and reliability of internal search engine)
3. Metadata (presence of metadata (metatags) in the HTML source code, author, keywords, description
4. Alternative captions (presence of alternative text at images)
5. Availability (availability of the homepage during a long period of time)
Credibility
1. Authorship (clear authorship of presented information)
2. Date of publication (presence of date of publication)
3. Date of the last updating (presence of date of the last updating)
4. Dead links (low number of deadlinks)
5. Faulties of HTML code (purity of source code of pages)