Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia: an assessment

Kupferberg, Natalie; Protus, Bridget McCrate

doi:10.3163/1536-5050.99.4.010

Cited by 53 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Of these, research has focused on a limited set of drugs or on information for patients and health practitioners [10], [11]. Whether Wikipedia is a suitable source of pharmacological information for students and educators in medical education has not been investigated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accuracy and Completeness of Drug Information in Wikipedia: A Comparison with Standard Textbooks of Pharmacology

et al. 2014

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The online resource Wikipedia is increasingly used by students for knowledge acquisition and learning. However, the lack of a formal editorial review and the heterogeneous expertise of contributors often results in skepticism by educators whether Wikipedia should be recommended to students as an information source. In this study we systematically analyzed the accuracy and completeness of drug information in the German and English language versions of Wikipedia in comparison to standard textbooks of pharmacology. In addition, references, revision history and readability were evaluated. Analysis of readability was performed using the Amstad readability index and the Erste Wiener Sachtextformel. The data on indication, mechanism of action, pharmacokinetics, adverse effects and contraindications for 100 curricular drugs were retrieved from standard German textbooks of general pharmacology and compared with the corresponding articles in the German language version of Wikipedia. Quantitative analysis revealed that accuracy of drug information in Wikipedia was 99.7%±0.2% when compared to the textbook data. The overall completeness of drug information in Wikipedia was 83.8±1.5% (p<0.001). Completeness varied in-between categories, and was lowest in the category “pharmacokinetics” (68.0%±4.2%; p<0.001) and highest in the category “indication” (91.3%±2.0%) when compared to the textbook data overlap. Similar results were obtained for the English language version of Wikipedia. Of the drug information missing in Wikipedia, 62.5% was rated as didactically non-relevant in a qualitative re-evaluation study. Drug articles in Wikipedia had an average of 14.6±1.6 references and 262.8±37.4 edits performed by 142.7±17.6 editors. Both Wikipedia and textbooks samples had comparable, low readability. Our study suggests that Wikipedia is an accurate and comprehensive source of drug-related information for undergraduate medical education.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accuracy and Completeness of Drug Information in Wikipedia: A Comparison with Standard Textbooks of Pharmacology

et al. 2014

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“…In the context of health information, the most prominent research direction focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia as a health information source for the public, with respect to cancer [96, 135], carpal tunnel syndrome [100], drug information [88], kidney conditions [156], and emerging infectious diseases [54]. …”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Global Disease with Wikipedia

Priedhorsky

Osthus

Daughton

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

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Effective disease monitoring provides a foundation for effective public health systems. This has historically been accomplished with patient contact and bureaucratic aggregation, which tends to be slow and expensive. Recent internet-based approaches promise to be real-time and cheap, with few parameters. However, the question of when and how these approaches work remains open. We addressed this question using Wikipedia access logs and category links. Our experiments, replicable and extensible using our open source code and data, test the effect of semantic article filtering, amount of training data, forecast horizon, and model staleness by comparing across 6 diseases and 4 countries using thousands of individual models. We found that our minimal-configuration, language-agnostic article selection process based on semantic relatedness is effective for improving predictions, and that our approach is relatively insensitive to the amount and age of training data. We also found, in contrast to prior work, very little forecasting value, and we argue that this is consistent with theoretical considerations about the nature of forecasting. These mixed results lead us to propose that the currently observational field of internet-based disease surveillance must pivot to include theoretical models of information flow as well as controlled experiments based on simulations of disease.

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“…Studies assessing the quality of Web sites for providing health information in general and drug information in particular are plentiful, but as mentioned in one of the most rigorous systematic reviews published in JAMA, those studies have produced mixed results and conclusions (Eysenbach et al 2002). Particularly in terms of Web sites providing drug information, numerous publications proved these online sources to be inconsistent, inaccurate, and often lacking or omitting important data on safety, contraindications, adverse effects, and drug interactions (Kupferberg and Protus 2011;Tatsioni et al 2003). Consumers have to be educated about the best free Web sites providing accurate and reliable drug information as well as on ways to evaluate online resources for information quality (Kupferberg and Protus 2011;MartinFacklam et al 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Particularly in terms of Web sites providing drug information, numerous publications proved these online sources to be inconsistent, inaccurate, and often lacking or omitting important data on safety, contraindications, adverse effects, and drug interactions (Kupferberg and Protus 2011;Tatsioni et al 2003). Consumers have to be educated about the best free Web sites providing accurate and reliable drug information as well as on ways to evaluate online resources for information quality (Kupferberg and Protus 2011;MartinFacklam et al 2004). The majority of these sites are created by medical or pharmaceutical organizations or the government, but there are also many high quality commercial Web sites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Free Drug Information Resources on the Internet

Lapidus

Dryankova-Bond

2014

Journal of Consumer Health On the Internet

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During the last decade, a growing number of consumers and health care professionals have turned to the web to find information on medications including prescription and over-the-counter drug products. Educating users to evaluate online drug information and select only the most accurate and high-quality online information resources has become extremely important. A number of reputable web sites created by government, medical, and commercial organizations can be recommended for obtaining comprehensive information on drug indications, contraindications, adverse effects, and interactions as well as providing recommendations on purchasing medications online.

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Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia: an assessment

Cited by 53 publications

References 1 publication

Accuracy and Completeness of Drug Information in Wikipedia: A Comparison with Standard Textbooks of Pharmacology

Accuracy and Completeness of Drug Information in Wikipedia: A Comparison with Standard Textbooks of Pharmacology

Measuring Global Disease with Wikipedia

Free Drug Information Resources on the Internet

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