Evaluating a Medical Website for Credibility

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The credibility of the Website
Importance of Evaluating Website Credibility
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction

The website that has been selected for this review is the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses’ website. The website is a platform that allows medical-surgery nurses to interact. In addition, it provides information on nursing issues, especially in the field of medical-surgical nursing. Also, it contains information concerning certification, resources to assist medical-surgical nurses to practice, and ways in which nurses can advance professionally.

The website was located through Google search by using the search terms ‘nursing websites.’ Selection of the website involved locating the most appropriate domain name. Websites ending with ‘.org’ or ‘.gov’ were considered to be more desirable compared to those that did not. The rationale behind the selection was that the website met the selection criteria. First, its web address ends with ‘.gov’ or ‘.org.’ and deals with issues related to nursing.

The credibility of the Website

Assessing the credibility of a website requires a multifaceted approach (Metzger, 2007). With this in mind, this paper will assess the credibility of the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses’ website. More focus will be on the evaluation of the content of the site and the site itself. The paper will examine the authority of the site, the information provided, its objectivity, ease of navigation, privacy, and security policies.

Authority

Authority is defined as the trustworthiness, or expertise of the sources of the information on the website. There are two categories of authority. They include the authority of the publisher and the authority of the writer. The selected website is owned by the academy of surgical-medical nurses. As such, the organization is the author and the publisher of the information through its members (Mattus, 2007). Most of the content on the site is developed by nurses or the nursing profession.

The content is mainly used for research purposes. Also, the website has professional resources. As such, it reinforces the idea that the authority of the website is credible. The website indicates it’s owned by the organization, Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses. Such reputable organizations are viewed to provide credible information by readers (Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses, 2014).

Information

Information on the site is mostly about surgical-medical nursing. The information is developed by professional nurses and is mostly geared towards increasing knowledge among nurses on various issues affecting them. It also helps them reflect on issues affecting their competence in care provision. The information from the site is reliable since most are research-based and are written by professionals in the field of surgical-medical nursing.

Resources on the site are connected to online libraries, such as the Hashford Institute for Geriatric Nursing (Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses, 2014). The site offers professional nurses resources to enhance their careers through the imparting of new information that includes legislation, practice resources to aid in professional development and certification for nurses seeking to advance their careers.

Novices in their career would opt for a platform that addresses all these issues, thereby the website is recommended for every professional nurse. For instance, a professional nurse seeking information on new legislation on their profession would easily access the information on the website on the daily news updates; secondly for a novice looking to advance and access nurse related specific information, the website offers a platform for access of opportunities and a form to share information among nurses e.g. practice resources, thirdly the portal will avail information on quality improvement particularly to unit process improvement projects to a professional nurse seeking to evaluate quality performance.

Objectivity

The objectivity of a site is concerning the information that it contains. Information on the site is not opinionated and is mostly research-based. The website reduces bias by ensuring all information is reviewed before being published on the site. Also, the information is derived from peer-reviewed sources. Clarification can be sought by visiting the recommended online libraries(Academy of Medical Surgical Nurses, 2014) (Academy of Medical Surgical Nurses, 2014).

Ease of navigation

Ease of navigation is measured using how easily one can move from one section to another or around the site. Also, it can be measured on the ease of getting relevant information and ease of returning to the main or home page. Lastly, it can be examined through the number of links that are available and the presence of related search tools (Hassan & Abuelrub, 2011). From this point of view, the Academy of surgical-medical nurses’ website has low ease of navigation. This can be attributed to a large number of links on the website. Finding relevant information can be complex when using the site as the links are further interlinked. Also, one must leave the site for more comprehensive information on various issues.

Privacy

Privacy is multi-dimensional and mostly encompasses the protection of personal information from disclosure to third parties. It can be described by various concepts, such as maintenance of confidentiality, anonymity, control of personal information, freedom, and self-determination. Website privacy is a contentious issue since there are no particular tools for measuring privacy (Goi, 2012). In this particular website, the publisher indicates that the website protects personal information from being disclosed to third parties. Personal information collected by the website is mostly used by the organization to provide information to the account holders. It is not given to third parties. Arguably, the site has put up measures to ensure privacy (Academy of Medical Surgical Nurses, 2014).

Security Policies

Security is related to privacy. The website contains no information on their security policies. However, the privacy policies may be used to secure the information on the website (Hassan & Abuelrub, 2011).

Importance of Evaluating Website Credibility

The advent of the web has allowed the dissemination of information on a wider scale compared to the pre-web era. Web sites provide everyone with an opportunity to become an author which raises concern on the credibility of websites as a source of scholarly information (Metzger, 2007). In particular, websites operate without any particular oversight, an issue that exacerbates the issues of credibility. Information on websites is not sifted.

As such, information that is misrepresented, wrong, or plagiarized is likely to be posted on websites(Calkins & Kelley, 2007). Nurses have the responsibility to evaluate website credibility to assess whether the information on the website is accurate, relevant, or scholarly. In particular, the nursing professional puts more emphasis on gathering information from scholarly sources (Miller et al., 2010).

Scholarly sources of information are credible. However, their credibility differs significantly from one another. Scholarly sources of information contain information that has been written by experts in a particular field. Their audiences are also persons interested in information in the same field. Some characteristics of this information include the use of discipline-specific terminology and language, containing specific details of the issue, and acknowledging sources of information that have been used to develop the work. Also, scholarly information is peer-reviewed (Miller et al., 2010). Conclusively, nurses must evaluate sources of information to determine whether they are credible and scholarly to ensure they source out the correct information. The veracity of information accessed is important for a nurse to ensure accuracy and dependability(West & Rich, 2012).

Conclusion

From the evaluation of the Academy Of Medical Surgical Nurses’ website, it is evident that the website contains credible information. The information is objective and is reviewed by professionals in the medical surgical nursing field. Despite the high score in terms of objectivity, privacy, quality of information, and authority, the website has low ease of navigation. This has been attributed to the presence of many links and poor design. On the other hand, the advent of the web has led to an increase in sources of information that are not credible. As such, nurses can use the above criteria to determine the credibility of website sources. Also, it’s worth noting that credible sources are not always scholarly. As discussed, scholarly sources differ significantly from other sources of credible information.

Reference List

Academy of Medical Surgical Nurses. (2014). Web.

Calkins, S., & Kelley, M. (2007). Evaluating Internet and Scholarly Sources Across Disciplines: Two Case Studies. College Teaching, 55(4), 151-156. Web.

Goi, C. (2012). A Review of Web Evaluation Criteria for E-Commerce Web Sites. Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, 17(3), 1-10.

Hassan, L., & Abuelrub, E. (2011). Assessing the Quality of Websites. Applied Computing and Informatics, 9(1), 11-29.

Mattus, M. (2007). Finding Credible Information: A Challenge to Students Writing Academic Essays. Human IT, 9(2), 1-28.

Metzger, M. J. (2007). Making Sense of Credibility on the Web: Models for Evaluating Online Information and Recommendation for Future Research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2078-2091.

Miller, L. C., Graves, R. S., Sievert, M. C., & Jones, B. (2010). Beyond Google: Finding and Evaluating Web-Based Information for Community Based Nursing Practice. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 7(1), 1-16.

West, R., & Rich, P. (2012). Rigor, Impact and Prestige: A Proposed Framework for Evaluating Scholarly Publications. Innovative Higher Education, 37(5), 359-371. Web.

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