Joshi Ashish, Kajal Fnu, Bhuyan Soumitra S, Sharma Priya, Bhatt Ashruti, Kumar Kanishk, Kaur Mahima, Arora Arushi
City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, New York, NY, USA.
Urban Local Bodies, Government of India, New Delhi, India.
ScientificWorldJournal. 2020 Aug 6;2020:1562028. doi: 10.1155/2020/1562028. eCollection 2020.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread globally from its epicenter in Hubei, China, and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. The most popular search engine worldwide is Google, and since March 2020, COVID-19 has been a global trending search term. Misinformation related to COVID-19 from these searches is a problem, and hence, it is of high importance to assess the quality of health information over the internet related to COVID-19. The objective of our study is to examine the quality of COVID-19 related health information over the internet using the DISCERN tool.
The keywords included in assessment of COVID-19 related information using Google's search engine were "Coronavirus," "Coronavirus causes," "Coronavirus diagnosis," "Coronavirus prevention," and "Coronavirus management". The first 20 websites from each search term were gathered to generate a list of 100 URLs. Duplicate sites were excluded from this search, allowing analysis of unique sites only. Additional exclusion criteria included scientific journals, nonoperational links, nonfunctional websites (where the page was not loading, was not found, or was inactive), and websites in languages other than English. This resulted in a unique list of 48 websites. Four independent raters evaluated the websites using a 16-item DISCERN tool to assess the quality of novel coronavirus related information available on the internet. The interrater reliability agreement was calculated using the intracluster correlation coefficient.
Results showed variation in how the raters assigned scores to different website categories. The .com websites received the lowest scores. Results showed that .edu and .org website category sites were excellent in communicating coronavirus related health information; however, they received lower scores for treatment effect and treatment choices.
This study highlights the gaps in the quality of information that is available on the websites related to COVID-19 and study emphasizes the need for verified websites that provide evidence-based health information related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
新型冠状病毒病（COVID-19）已从中国湖北的疫情中心蔓延至全球，并于2020年3月11日被世界卫生组织（WHO）宣布为大流行病。全球最受欢迎的搜索引擎是谷歌，自2020年3月以来，COVID-19一直是全球热门搜索词。这些搜索中与COVID-19相关的错误信息是个问题，因此，评估互联网上与COVID-19相关的健康信息质量至关重要。我们研究的目的是使用DISCERN工具检查互联网上与COVID-19相关的健康信息质量。
使用谷歌搜索引擎评估与COVID-19相关信息时包含的关键词为“冠状病毒”“冠状病毒病因”“冠状病毒诊断”“冠状病毒预防”和“冠状病毒管理”。从每个搜索词的前20个网站中收集，生成100个网址的列表。此搜索排除重复网站，仅允许分析唯一网站。其他排除标准包括科学期刊、无法运行的链接、无功能的网站（页面未加载、未找到或不活跃）以及非英语语言的网站。这产生了48个网站的唯一列表。四名独立评分者使用16项DISCERN工具评估这些网站，以评估互联网上可用的新型冠状病毒相关信息的质量。使用组内相关系数计算评分者间的可靠性一致性。
结果显示评分者对不同网站类别的评分存在差异。.com网站得分最低。结果表明，.edu和.org网站类别在传播冠状病毒相关健康信息方面表现出色；然而，它们在治疗效果和治疗选择方面得分较低。
本研究突出了与COVID-19相关的网站上可用信息质量的差距，研究强调需要经过验证的网站，提供与新型冠状病毒大流行相关的循证健康信息。
