Table 4.

Net Scoring Criteria to Assess the Quality of Health Information

1 Credibility (100 points)	1.1 Source 1.1a Name, logo and references of the institution on each document of the site (essential criterion) 1.1b Name and title of author on each document of the site (essential criterion) 1.2 Disclosure 1.2a Context: source of financing, independence of the author(s) (essential criterion) 1.2b Conflict of interest (important criterion) 1.2c Influence, bias (important criterion) 1.3 Updating: currency information of the site including date of creation, date of last update and eventually date of last version (essential criterion) 1.4 Relevance/utility (essential criterion) 1.5 Editorial review process (essential criterion) 1.5a Webmastering process (important criterion) 1.5b Scientific review process (important criterion) 1.6. Target/purpose of the web site; access to the site (free or not, reserved or not) (important criterion) 1.7. Quality of the language and/or translation (important criterion) 1.8 Use of metadata (essential criterion)
2 Content (79 points)	2.1 Accuracy (essential criterion) 2.2 Hierarchy of evidence (important criterion) 2.3 Original Source Stated (essential criterion) 2.4 Disclaimer (important criterion) 2.5 Logic organization (navigability) (essential criterion) 2.5a Quality of the internal search engine (important criterion) 2.5b General index (important criterion) 2.5c What's new page (important criterion) 2.5d Help page (minor criterion) 2.5e Map of the site (minor criterion) 2.7 Omissions noted (essential criterion) 2.8 Fast load of the site and its different pages (important criterion) 2.9 Clear display of available information categories (factual data, abstracts, full-text documents, catalogue, databases) (important criterion)
3 Hyperlinks (52 points)	3.1 Selection (essential criterion) 3.2 Architecture (important criterion) 3.3 Content (essential criterion) 3.4 Back-links or number of hyperlinks to the resource in question (Web Impact Factor) (important criterion) 3.5 Regular verification that hyper-links are functioning, i.e., no broken links (important criterion) 3.6 In case of modification of the site structure, link between old and new HTML documents (important criterion) 3.7 Distinction between internal and external hyper-links (minor criterion)
4 Design (20 points)	4.1 Design of the site (essential criterion) 4.2 Readability of the text, images, or video (important criterion) 4.3 Quality of the print (important criterion)
5 Interactivity (17 points)	5.1 Mechanism for feedback: Email of the author on every document (essential criterion) 5.2 Forums, chat (minor criterion) 5.3 Users must be clearly informed if the site is using cookies or any similar technologies to trace their logging into the site and to retrieve information about their machines (even if the tracing is done in anonymous form). Users must be able to opt in or opt out of functions that track personal or machine information at any time (important criterion)
6 Quantitative aspects (9 points)	6.1 Number of machines (IP addresses) visiting the site and number of visualised documents (important criterion) 6.2 Number of press releases (minor criterion) 6.3 Number of scientific production from the site, including bibliometric criteria (minor criterion)
7 Ethics (20 points)	7.1 Liability of the reader (essential criterion) 7.2 Medical privacy (essential criterion)
8 Accessibility (10 points)	8.1 Accessibility from the main search engines and catalogues (important criterion) 8.2 Intuitive address of a site (important criterion)
	297 points maximum