Follow up of quality of public oriented health information on the world wide web: systematic re-evaluation

In 1997 one of the first studies to evaluate the quality of health information on the internet was published.1 This article assessed the reliability of information for managing fever in children at home and found that the quality of information was poor. Four years after publication these findings were mentioned in 78 journals (from Journal Citation Report ), and the message should therefore have reached a wide audience. We investigated the effects of the earlier findings by re-evaluating the quality of the original web pages four years later, as well as that of a more recent sample of pages, using the same methods. On 28 June 2001 we searched articles through the Institute for Scientific Information's citation index for references to the earlier study. …