Quality of Internet Websites on Providing Patient Information on Trabeculectomy
Purpose
To evaluate the quality of information on Trabeculectomy surgery available to patients on the internet.
Methods
Using Google search engine, a search was generated using the keyword 'Trabeculectomy'. The first 50 websites were evaluated using an instrument published in the Journal of the American Medical Association for qualifying internet information. Each website was graded as either 0 or 1 under the categories 'Authorship', 'Attribution', 'Disclosure', and 'Last Updated' by two blinded evaluators, yielding a total score ranging from 0 to 4. Six websites were excluded due to duplicate, video or non-functional links. The following six in the 'Google' search were used.
Results
Of the websites evaluated, 15% met criteria for all four categories, 66% met criteria for one, two or three categories, and 19% did not meet any of the criteria. 31% of the websites met the criteria for 'Authorship', 21% for 'Attribution', 14% for 'Disclosure' and 34% for 'Last Updated'. Of the websites evaluated, 16 were journal-affiliated websites, 12 were miscellaneous websites, 9 were websites providing ophthalmology specific information, 7 providing general information, including encylopedias and dictionaries, and 6 were personal websites of ophthalmologists or ophthalmology clinics. Intra-rater reproducibility of website grading was high (kappa range 0.757 to 1).
Conclusion
Although there is a great deal of information on trabeculectomy available to patients on the internet, there is large variation in quality. Our study found that the large majority of websites relating to trabeculectomy can be considered incomplete, and it is therefore difficult to know if the information from these websites are accurate.