Quality assessment of information on oral cancer provided at Arabic speaking websites

Abstract

Background: Patients often use Inernet to explore information about their health and disease. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of information on oral cancer provided at Arabic websites. Material and Method: The translated Arabic keywords of "oral cancer" and treatment of oral cancer" and 6 search engines were used. The top 100 websites were selected. Irrelevant and duplicates websites were excluded. To evaluate the quality of websites and their information, DISCERN, HON, and JAMA benchmarks were used. Results: The majority (n = 64, 74.4%) of websites were founded by profit organizations. The mean overall rating was 2.23 (1.6) out of 5 and the median overall rating was 1 (1-3) based on DISCERN. According to HON, only 4.7% of the websites achieved a high score (≥75) and 37.2% of the websites gained a low score (<50). Based on JAMA benchmarks, 15% of the websites did not fulfill any criteria and only 2% of them fulfilled the four criteria proposed by the JAMA benchmarks. Conclusion: This study suggested the poor quality of web-based Arabic information on oral cancer. It is recommended to develop a websites based system by which enable to the Arabic websites related to oral cancer know their shortfalls, therefore, improve their quality according to evaluation tools which will ensure finding reliable data from the websites.