ArticleMedicine2017
Readability of internet-sourced patient education material related to "labour analgesia".
Article in Medicine, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Readability Study: A Randomised Trial of Health Information Written at Different Grade Reading Levels.Journal of general internal medicine · 2025Trial
- Utility of ChatGPT-4o in Creating Patient Handouts in Ophthalmology: A Comparison With American Academy of Ophthalmology Educational Materials.Translational vision science & technology · 2026Article
- Assessing the readability and quality of online written information on epistaxis.Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England · 2025Article
- Spanish-Language Patient Education Materials for Obstetric Anesthesia: A Comparison of Readability and Quality of Online Spanish-Language Resources.Women's health reports (New Rochelle, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Assessing the Utility of ChatGPT in Simplifying Text Complexity of Patient Educational Materials.Cureus · 2024Article
- Assessing the readability and quality of online information on benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England · 2024Article
- Viral Disease Goes Viral: Characterizing How Cancer Patients Use Internet Resources for COVID-19 Information.Journal of cancer education : the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Education · 2023Article
- Evaluating breast cancer websites targeting Arabic speakers: empirical investigation of popularity, availability, accessibility, readability, and quality.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2022Article
- Understanding Information Needs and Barriers to Accessing Health Information Across All Stages of Pregnancy: Systematic Review.JMIR pediatrics and parenting · 2022Review
- Article
- Assessing the reading level of online resources on COVID-19.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2020Article
- Web-Based Health Information Following the Renewal of the Cervical Screening Program in Australia: Evaluation of Readability, Understandability, and Credibility.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We evaluated the readability of Internet-sourced patient education materials (PEMs) related to "labour analgesia." In addition to assessing the readability of websites, we aimed to compare commercial, personal, and academic websites.We used the most popular search engine (http://www.google.com) in our study. The first 100 websites in English that resulted from a search for the key words "labour analgesia" were scanned. Websites that were not in English, graphs, pictures, videos, tables, figures and list formats in the text, all punctuation, the number of words in the text is less than 100 words, feedback forms not related to education, (Uniform Resource Locator) URL websites, author information, references, legal disclaimers, and addresses and telephone numbers were excluded.The texts included in the study were assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), and Gunning Frequency of Gobbledygook (FOG) readability formulae. The number of Latin words within the text was determined.Analysis of 300-word sections of the texts revealed that the mean FRES was 47.54 ± 12.54 (quite difficult), mean FKGL and SMOG were 11.92 ± 2.59 and 10.57 ± 1.88 years of education, respectively, and mean Gunning FOG was 14.71 ± 2.76 (very difficult). Within 300-word sections, the mean number of Latin words was identified as 16.56 ± 6.37.In our study, the readability level of Internet-sourced PEM related to "labour analgesia" was identified to be quite high indicating poor readability.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.