Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 10:40:32 -0600
To: MEDWEBMASTERS-L@LISTSERV.ACOR.ORG
From: "Kim Solez, M.D." Kim.Solez@UAlberta.CA
Subject: Re: [MWM-L] http://www.cyber-medicine.org- sharing knowledge between
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Dear Doug:

We have made the three links so obvious now that I can't imagine anyone will not be able to navigate them! On IE they even change color on mouseover!
The Medical Matrix ratings are explained exactly at: http://www.medmatrix.org/info/edboard.asp#Star

There might be very valuable WWW sites that one would use for completely different purposes, but here is the rationale behind their ratings from the link above:
Resource Evaluation
1. DIMENSION / USEFULNESS FOR CLINICAL APPLICATIONS:
The resource enhances the knowledgebase of the target clinician or specialist at the point of care. Resource documents have current clinical relevance and importance, intellectual and scientific strength, and clarity of presentation. The prestige of authors and institutions are good. The documents are strong compared to other web pages under review in the documents' category. The documents contribute to a balanced picture of medicine. (1-20 points)
Ranking: 0 4 8 12 16 20
Comment:
2.VERIFIABILITY, CLARITY, AND INTEGRITY: Resource document content is verifiable, endorsed, dated, current, and referenced. The material is original; the writing is clear; there is a minimization of bias; conclusions are reasonable and supported by evidence presented. The effort is ethical. The documents offer a comparison with relevant findings from other publications; and whenever possible, the medical literature is systematically reviewed and summarized to assist in the estimate of the strength of the documents' conclusions. Financial interests are disclosed, whether they are direct or indirect.
(1-10 points)
Ranking: 0 2 4 6 8 10
Comment:
3.EVIDENCE-BASED CRITERIA:
Conclusions are based on studies that are methodologically sound, meet statistical validity criteria, and are clinically relevant. Conclusions are rated against a "gold standard" in that they are founded upon randomized trials with appropriate follow-up and are based on studies that make an independent, blind comparison of tests. (1-10 points)
Ranking: 0 2 4 6 8 10
Comment:
4.MEDIA:
Text, hypertext, or use of multimedia: images, video, sound in the context of the resource (eg: image database). (1-10 points)
Ranking: 0 1 2 3 4 5
Comment:
5.FEEL/EASE OF ACCESS:
Easy to follow in terms of composition, advanced HTML tools, and integration within a larger database. Clinical content highlighted, reliability and speed of the link, bytes to the page. (1-5 points)
Ranking: 0 1 2 3 4 5
Comment:

My history with Medical Matrix is quite simple. I had a dispute with them in 1997 because I thought their listings in nephrology were totally inappropriate. As a consequence I completely ignored them for three years. But now coming back to them I find that they have improved a lot and they are the only source at the moment of the sort of data that appears on their pages spanning all areas of medicine. I have had no contact with them for three years and that can be well documented, so I consider myself quite an objective observer!

Best regards. - Kim

We have created just today the WWW site http://www.cyber-medicine.org (note the hyphen!) devoted to enhancing health uses of the Internet across all areas of medicine. We invite you to go to the site and react to the information already there by sharing ideas about innovative approaches using on line resources and the sites you have found most useful and novel to add to the list. I think there is something of interest to everyone since we have statistics on every area of medicine. We would welcome input either sent privately to me or, if the comments of broad general interest, sent to MEDWEBMASTERS-L or MMATRIX-L . We look forward to hearing from all of you and working with you to make this new site the best it can possibly be and making things better for all of us!

All the best. - Kim

I would like to point out a couple of things...

1) The links are hard to see. I had to look at the source code to find them. Maybe I'm just dense....
2) I have found medmatrix.org to be singularly useless. I have asked them countless times to list my web site, with no response and no action. The sites that are listed are, in my opinion, usually not even the best ones on the internet. And the ratings? Well, they seem kind of arbitrary and not particularly accurate. For example, if you look up testicular cancer, the number one rated site (due to sorting, plus having 5 stars) is the merck manual. Now the merck manual may be a great resource, but it has about 1 page of information on testicular cancer. 5 stars? I don't think so. The second site listed is actually an article written by one of the doctors on my medical advisory board who happened to have testicular cancer. It is a good article, but it is still a short article aimed at family doctors. Other sites are far more comprehensive. perhaps I am too critical, but I would classify close to half the 5 star sites as marginal or just plain crap. Just look at this 5 star site for an example of "crap": http://www.sadap.org.za/edl/adult/14.2.asp

I think that the links pages on smaller sites devoted to single diseases or conditions are far more likely to have carefully evaluated links. It is clear that medmatrix evaluates sites as a whole, ranks them as a whole, and then applies that ranking to every damn subject the site covers, even if it covers some only in passing.

....tirade done for now.

Sorry.

Doug Bank
Secure Design Center
dougb@comm.mot.com
Motorola Communications Sector
Schaumburg, Illinois
847-576-8207