Rating health web sites using the principles of citation analysis: a bibliometric approach.

The rapid growth in the number of health care related web sites necessitates that medical librarians be able to evaluate the quality of the web sites. By analysing the linked sources medical libraries web pages of nineteen of the top U.S. medical schools, this study used the citation analysis method. What was found with this bibliometric approach was a set of 78 most highly cited WWW sites out of thousands of cited links. The identification of the current, core section of health sciences related web sites with a bibliometric method gives librarians and information scientists another approach for evaluating web sites.