bims-librar Biomed News on Biomedical librarianship
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Issue of 2020‒02‒02 │
nine papers selected by │
Thomas Krichel (Open Library │
 Society) │
 http://e.biomed.news/librar │
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1. Measures of self-efficacy among doctors in conducting an online search
    for clinical decision making.
2. Title, abstract and keyword searching resulted in poor recovery of
    articles in systematic reviews of epidemiologic practice.
3. Topology comparison of Twitter diffusion networks effectively reveals
    misleading information.
4. A Disclosure Form for Work Submitted to Medical Journals - A Proposal
    from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
5. Effective publication strategies in clinical research.
6. Trends, Quality, and Readability of Online Health Resources on Proton
    Radiotherapy.
7. A Critical Analysis of the Information Available Online for Ménière's
    Disease.
8. 'Prostate Cancer' Information on the Internet: Fact or Fiction?
9. Evaluation of the Informational Content and Readability of US Lung
    Cancer Screening Program Websites.

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                                                Health Info Libr J. 2020 Jan 27.
1. Measures of self-efficacy among doctors in conducting an online search
    for clinical decision making.
   Naeem SB, Bhatti R
 OBJECTIVES: To measure the perceived ability and level of confidence among
 doctors in performing the different tasks involved in conducting an online
 search for clinical decision making.
  METHODS: A large-scale cross-sectional survey was conducted in 36 District
 Headquarter Hospitals (DHQs), 89 Tehsil Headquarter Hospitals (THQs), 293
 Rural Health Centers (RHCs) and 2455 Basic Health Units (BHUs) in Punjab,
 Pakistan. Using a quota sampling, data were collected from 517 doctors on a
 set of 11 statements. The collected data were analysed statistically.
  RESULTS: Of the 517 doctors, 73 (14.1%) had 'never accessed health care
 information online' for clinical decision making. Mean values of the doctors'
 response to the 11 statements ranged from 1.66 to 2.30 indicating that most
 of the doctors were 'not confident' in their ability to perform the tasks.
  CONCLUSION: The majority of doctors perceived themselves able to perform the
 different tasks involved in conducting an online search. Age and working
 experience were significant factors in the perception of their ability in
 performing the tasks. The study recommends promotional and educational
 activities to motivate interest, increase awareness, develop knowledge and
 skills for doctors to access information that would help in their clinical
 decision making.
  Keywords: Asia, South; database searching; doctors; health professionals;
   information literacy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12289
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31984631

                     J Clin Epidemiol. 2020 Jan 23. pii: S0895-4356(19)30601-8.
2. Title, abstract and keyword searching resulted in poor recovery of
    articles in systematic reviews of epidemiologic practice.
   Penning de Vries BBL, van Smeden M, Rosendaal FR, Groenwold RHH
 OBJECTIVE: Article full texts are often inaccessible via the standard search
 engines of biomedical literature, such as PubMed and Embase, which are
 commonly used for systematic reviews. Excluding the full text bodies from a
 literature search may result in a small or selective subset of articles being
 included in the review because of the limited information that is available
 in only title, abstract and keywords. This article describes a comparison of
 search strategies based on a systematic literature review of all manuscripts
 published in 5 top-ranked epidemiology journals between 2000 and 2017.
  STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: Based on a text-mining approach, we studied whether
 9 different methodological topics were mentioned across text fields (title,
 abstract, keywords, and text body). The following methodological topics were
 studied: propensity score methods, inverse probability weighting, marginal
 structural modelling, multiple imputation, Kaplan-Meier estimation, number
 needed to treat, measurement error, randomized controlled trial, and latent
 class analysis.
  RESULTS: In total, 31,641 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files were
 downloaded from the journals' websites. For all methodological topics and
 journals, at most 50% of articles with a mention of a topic in the text body
 also mentioned the topic in the title, abstract or keywords. For each topic,
 a gradual decrease over calendar time was observed of reporting in the title,
 abstract or keywords.
  CONCLUSION: Literature searches based on title, abstract and keywords alone
 may not be sufficiently sensitive for studies of epidemiological research
 practice. This study also illustrates the potential value of full text
 literature searches, provided there is accessibility of full text bodies for
 literature searches.
  Keywords: Systematic literature review; bibliometrics; epidemiological
   methods; statistical methods; text mining
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.01.009
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31982541

                                               Sci Rep. 2020 Jan 28. 10(1): 1372
3. Topology comparison of Twitter diffusion networks effectively reveals
    misleading information.
   Pierri F, Piccardi C, Ceri S
 In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social
 media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important
 studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about
 this phenomenon, showing that misleading information spreads faster, deeper
 and more broadly than factual information on social media, where echo
 chambers, algorithmic and human biases play an important role in diffusion
 networks. Following these directions, we explore the possibility of
 classifying news articles circulating on social media based exclusively on a
 topological analysis of their diffusion networks. To this aim we collected a
 large dataset of diffusion networks on Twitter pertaining to news articles
 published on two distinct classes of sources, namely outlets that convey
 mainstream, reliable and objective information and those that fabricate and
 disseminate various kinds of misleading articles, including false news
 intended to harm, satire intended to make people laugh, click-bait news that
 may be entirely factual or rumors that are unproven. We carried out an
 extensive comparison of these networks using several alignment-free
 approaches including basic network properties, centrality measures
 distributions, and network distances. We accordingly evaluated to what extent
 these techniques allow to discriminate between the networks associated to the
 aforementioned news domains. Our results highlight that the communities of
 users spreading mainstream news, compared to those sharing misleading news,
 tend to shape diffusion networks with subtle yet systematic differences which
 might be effectively employed to identify misleading and harmful information.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58166-5
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31992754

                                                      N Engl J Med. 2020 Jan 27.
4. A Disclosure Form for Work Submitted to Medical Journals - A Proposal
    from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
   Taichman DB, Backus J, Baethge C, Bauchner H, Flanagin A, Florenzano F,
   Frizelle FA, Godlee F, Gollogly L, Haileamlak A, Hong ST, Horton R, James
   A, Laine C, Miller PW, Pinborg A, Rubin EJ, Sahni P
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMe2000647
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31986241

                                                 PLoS One. 2020 ;15(1): e0228438
5. Effective publication strategies in clinical research.
   Deutz DB, Vlachos E, Drongstrup D, Dorch BF, Wien C
 Researchers in Europe are increasingly assessed by their publication metrics.
 To uncover the effect of quantitative assessment on the publication
 strategies of clinical researchers in Denmark, we interviewed 9 senior
 researchers at the Department of Clinical Research at the University of
 Southern Denmark with the lowest and highest values for a, as defined by
 Hirsch. Our aim is to investigate the importance of these metrics to their
 academic careers: h-index, number of publications, number of citations,
 international collaborations, local collaborations, field specific journal
 publishing and high journal impact factor publishing. To validate our
 findings we compared their publication record to their statistically analyzed
 stated publication strategy. Our results indicate two styles of publication
 strategy used by these senior researchers. Researchers with Low a engage in
 local collaborations, disseminate knowledge in local media and publish in
 field specific journals, while researchers with High a engage in
 international collaborations, invest significant time in publishing in the
 highest impact journals in their field, and acquire a greater number of
 citations. Both publication strategies can lead to a successful academic
 career, yet we have an indication through the h5-index that the practices of
 the High a group are more likely to nudge the h-index.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228438
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31999763

         Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2020 Jan 24. pii: S0360-3016(20)30061-4.
6. Trends, Quality, and Readability of Online Health Resources on Proton
    Radiotherapy.
   Sha ST, Perni S, Muralidhar V, Mahal BA, Sanford NN, Nguyen PL, Dee EC
 OBJECTIVES: Many patients weighing cancer treatment options may consider
 relatively novel options including proton radiotherapy (PRT) and turn to the
 Internet for online health resources (OHR). However, quality and readability
 of OHR for radiation oncology therapies has been shown to need improvement.
 As the OHR patients access can influence their treatment decisions, our study
 sought to understand the patterns of use, quality, and readability of OHR on
 PRT.
  METHODS: To validate the need to assess OHR on PRT, we assessed US search
 patterns for the search phrase "proton therapy" using Google Trends. The
 Google search engine was then queried for websites with PRT information using
 ten search phrases. The subsequent websites were analyzed for readability by
 the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and a Composite Grade Level metric
 comprised of five readability metrics. Quality was analyzed using the DISCERN
 instrument.
  RESULTS: Search volume index for "proton therapy" increased by an average of
 2.0% each year for the last 15 years (January 1, 2005 to June 1, 2019,
 P<0.001). States that had a greater number of proton centers tended to have a
 greater relative search volume in Google (P< 0.001). Of the 45 unique
 websites identified, the mean FKGL was 12.0 (7.3-18.6) and the mean Composite
 Grade Level was 12.4 (range 7-18). 80% of PRT pages required greater than
 11th grade Composite Grade Level. The mean DISCERN score of all websites was
 39.7, which corresponds to "fair"-quality OHR.
  CONCLUSION: Despite increasing interest in PRT OHR, in general, PRT websites
 require reading levels much higher than currently recommended, making PRT OHR
 less accessible to the average patient. Provision of high quality PRT OHR at
 the appropriate reading level may increase comprehension of PRT and improve
 patient autonomy and informed decision among radiation oncology patients.
  Keywords: Proton radiotherapy; online health resources; patient education;
   radiation oncology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrobp.2019.12.043
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31987973

                        Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2020 Jan 28. 194599819901150
7. A Critical Analysis of the Information Available Online for Ménière's
    Disease.
   Bojrab DI, Fritz C, Babu S, Lin KF
 OBJECTIVE: Patients increasingly rely on online resources for medical
 information; however, the Internet is unregulated and prone to
 misinformation. This study analyzes the reliability, quality, and readability
 of websites for Ménière's disease.
  STUDY DESIGN: A Google search was performed using keywords Ménière's disease.
 The first 5 pages (50 results) were reviewed. Websites were sorted into 5
 categories: academic institutions, government agencies, professional
 organizations, medical information websites, and miscellaneous. The
 reliability, quality, and readability of each website were evaluated using
 the DISCERN instrument and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL). DISCERN
 assesses reliability and quality by scoring 15 questions on a scale from 1
 (low) to 3 (high). The reliability score emphasizes clear objectives and
 sources, as well as lack of bias, whereas the quality score emphasizes
 information on treatment options. The FKGL of each website was calculated
 using a formula to determine the equivalent US grade reading level.
  SETTING: Ambulatory.
  SUBJECTS: None.
  RESULTS: Forty-two websites were analyzed. Academic institutions were the
 most common (n = 13, 31%) but scored the lowest using DISCERN at 1.75 ± 0.13.
 Medical information websites scored highest at 2.24 ± 0.09 (P = .024 compared
 to academic institutions). The average FKGL of all websites was 10.12 ± 0.57
 with medical information websites being the easiest to read at 8.84 ± 0.83.
 Only 5 (13%) of websites scored below the eighth-grade reading level.
  CONCLUSIONS: Most top online search results for Ménière's disease are
 deficient in quality and readability. Medical information websites are
 generally the most reliable and easy to read.
  Keywords: DISCERN index; Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level; Ménière’s disease;
   online patient education; readability
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0194599819901150
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31986955

                                              Curr Urol. 2020 Jan;13(4): 200-208
8. 'Prostate Cancer' Information on the Internet: Fact or Fiction?
   Moolla Y, Adam A, Perera M, Lawrentschuk N
 Background/Aims: In today's information era, patients often seek information
 regarding health using the internet. We assessed reliability and validity of
 internet information regarding 'prostate cancer'.
  Methods: Search term 'prostate cancer' used on Google website (June 2017).
 Critical analysis was performed on first 100 hits using JAMA benchmarks,
 DISCERN score, Health on the Net.
  Results: 33 500 000 hits returned. Top 100 hits were critically analyzed. Ten
 links [duplicate links (n = 7), book reviews (n = 1), dead sites (n = 2)]
 were excluded, therefore 90 were analyzed. Subcategories assessed included:
 commercial (53.33%), university/medical center (24.44%), government (13.33%);
 non-governmental/ non-profit organizations (8.89%). Sub-type of information
 content assessed included: factual (74.44%), clinical trials (18.89%);
 stories (5.56%); question and answer (1.11%). Website rated as HONcode seal
 positive (14,44%) or seal negative (85,56%). Website content based on JAMA
 benchmarks: 0 benchmarks (4.44%), 1 benchmark (16.67%), 2 benchmarks
 (34.44%), 3 benchmarks (27.78%), 4 benchmarks (16.67%). DISCERN score rated:
 'low' score (16-32) = 12 websites (13.33%), 'moderate' score (33-64 points) =
 68 websites (75.56%), 'high' score (≥ 65 points) = 10 websites (11.11%).
  Conclusion: Critical assessment of 'Prostate Cancer' information on the
 internet, showed that overall quality was observed to be accurate, however
 majority of individual websites are unreliable as a source of information by
 itself for patients. Doctors and patients need to be aware of this 'quality
 vs quantity' discrepancy when sourcing PCa information on the internet.
  Keywords: DISCERN score; Health on the Net seal; Internet information
   quality; JAMA Benchmarks; Prostate cancer
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1159/000499271
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31998052

                                     JAMA Netw Open. 2020 Jan 03. 3(1): e1920431
9. Evaluation of the Informational Content and Readability of US Lung
    Cancer Screening Program Websites.
   Gagne SM, Fintelmann FJ, Flores EJ, McDermott S, Mendoza DP, Petranovic M,
   Price MC, Stowell JT, Little BP
 Importance: The internet is an important source of medical information for
 many patients and may have a key role in the education of patients about lung
 cancer screening (LCS). Although most LCS programs in the United States have
 informational websites, the accuracy, completeness, and readability of these
 websites have not previously been studied.
  Objective: To evaluate the informational content and readability of US LCS
 program websites.
  Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study assessed US LCS
 program websites identified on September 15, 2018. A standardized checklist
 was used to assess key informational content of each website, and text was
 analyzed for reading level, word count, and reading time. Links to US
 websites of national advocacy organizations with LCS program content were
 tabulated. All functional LCS program websites in Google internet search
 engine results using the search terms lung cancer screening, low-dose CT
 screening, and lung screening were included in the analysis.
  Main Outcomes and Measures: Radiologists used a standardized checklist to
 evaluate content, and readability was assessed with validated scales. Website
 word count, reading time, and number of links to outside LCS informational
 websites were assessed.
  Results: A total of 257 LCS websites were included in the analysis. The word
 count ranged from 73 to 4410 (median, 571; interquartile range, 328-909). The
 reading time ranged from 0.3 to 19.6 minutes (median, 2.5; interquartile
 range, 1.5-4.0). The median reading level of all websites was grade 10
 (interquartile range, 9-11). Only 26% (n = 66) of websites had at least 1 web
 link to a national website with additional information on LCS. There was wide
 variability regarding reported eligibility age criteria, with ages 55 to 77
 years most frequently cited (42% [n = 108]). Only 56% (n = 143) of websites
 mentioned smoking cessation. The subject of patient cost was mentioned on 75%
 (n = 192) of websites. Although major LCS benefits, such as detection of lung
 cancer, were discussed by most (93% [n = 239]) websites, less than half of
 the websites (45% [n = 115]) made any mention of possible risks associated
 with screening.
  Conclusions and Relevance: There appears to be marked variability in the
 informational content of US LCS program websites, and the reading level of
 most websites is above that recommended by the American Medical Association
 and the National Institutes of Health. Efforts to improve website content and
 readability may be warranted.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.20431
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32003825

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