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- Title
THE QUALITY OF INFORMATION ABOUT BREAST CANCER ON THE ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH WEB.
- Authors
Ontanu, Ioana; Micu, Maria; Toboltoc, Catalin Paul; Nadasan, Valentin
- Abstract
Background: Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women. The disease is triggered when some cells in the structure of the mammary gland begin to multiply uncontrollably, eventually forming a tumor. It is very important that the main source of information of the population - the Internet - contains complete and correct information. Objective: First, the study aimed to assess the quality of breast cancer information on websites for people without medical training and to compare the quality of websites in Romanian and English, respectively. Another objective was to assess the relevance of Google's rank to the quality of a particular site. Material and methods: Fifty websites, half Romanian and half English were selected according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. For each site, the following were evaluated: site characteristics, credibility level (based on eEurope 2002 credibility criteria), completeness and accuracy of information, according to a predetermined scale. Finally, the results obtained for the two languages were compared and the correlations between completeness/accuracy - and credibility/Google rank were tested. Student-t and Mann-Whitney tests were applied for numerical variables and the Chi-square test was used for categorical variables. The threshold for statistical significance was set at 0.05. Results: : The completeness and accuracy scores were 5.8 and 8.1 for the Romanian websites and 7.0 and 8.4 for the English websites. While English websites had higher scores, the differences were not statistically significant (completeness: 7.0 vs 5.8, p=0.0661; accuracy: 8.4 vs 8.1 p=0.1515).The results of correlation tests were inconsistent. For the Romanian language, there was a positive correlation between credibility and accuracy, but not between credibility and completeness, respectively no correlation at Google rank. For English, lack of correlations to credibility-completeness, credibility-accuracy, negative correlation to rank Google-completeness, positive correlation to rank-Google-accuracy. Conclusions: Both Romanian and English websites contain incomplete and unreliable information regarding breast cancer, which is why it is absolutely necessary to complete the information through a medical consultation. The websites' credibility and Google ranking seem inconsistently related to content quality and probably are not reliable as indicators of information validity.
- Subjects
ROMANIA; HEALTH education standards; INTERNET standards; LANGUAGE &; languages; BREAST tumors; HEALTH; INFORMATION resources; CONFERENCES &; conventions; SEARCH engines; ENGLISH language
- Publication
Acta Marisiensis. Seria Medica, 2024, Vol 70, p31
- ISSN
2668-7755
- Publication type
Article