The influence of document characteristics on the quality of health web documents

Abstract

The quality of consumer-oriented health information on the Web is usually assessed through the medical certification of websites. These tools are built upon quality indicators but, so far, no standard set of indicators has been defined. The objective of the present study is to explore the popularity of specific document features and their influence on the quality of health web documents, using HON code as ground truth. A set of top-ranked health documents retrieved from a major search engine was characterized in a univariate analysis, and then used in a bivariate analysis to seek features that affect documents' quality. The univariate analysis provides insights into the characteristics of the overall population of the health web documents. The bivariate analysis reveals strong relations between documents' quality and a set of features (namely split content, videos, images, advertisements, English language) that are potential quality indicators. We characterized health web documents and identified specific document features that can be used to assess whether the information in such documents is trustworthy. The main contribution of this work is to provide other features as candidate indicators of quality. Non-health professionals can use these indicators in automatic and manual assessments of health content.