An examination of two web sites on sleep disorder shows substantial differences in format, authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage. The Health Encyclopedia-Diseases and Conditions web site and the ToSleep.com web site offer a good basis for comparison and contrast on these aspects of online medical/psychology research, and each offers a different profile in term of its reliability.
I visited Health Encyclopedia-Diseases and Conditions on May 11, 2008 at URL http://www.healthscout.com/ency/68/237/main.html. This site was created and is maintained by the Healthscout Network. The format of the site is excellent for researching the topic, as it provides links to related topics arranged alphabetically; the visitor can click once to get to the right letter of the alphabet, and then look for the term being researched. Below these links are links to information on definition, description, diagnosis, and treatment of sleep disorders, making this basic information on the topic very accessible. The site offers a Medline search capability as well, so the visitor can research the sleep disorder issue or other topics on Medline.
The site's accuracy appears to be solid, although it does not list an individual as the author. The articles are written by the HealthCentralNetwork as a whole, and individual credit I not provided. However, contact information for the network is given, including address, telephone number, and fax. In addition, the site provides links to related encyclopedia entries, videos, drug information and news articles. Moreover, the site is credentialed by virtue of its HONcode certification, which guarantees that the site is authoritative and assures complementarity, privacy, attribution, justifiability, transparency, financial disclosure, and advertising policy ("The HONCode in Brief"). The sleep disorder document on the site was produced for the purpose of providing general me...