ArticleThe Saudi dental journal2026
Quality, understandability, and actionability of Arabic web-based content on periodontal and related oral surgical procedures: a cross-sectional infodemiological study.
Article in The Saudi dental journal, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Arabic-language health content has grown quickly online, but how well it serves patients considering periodontal and related oral surgery is unknown. This study assessed the quality, understandability, and actionability of Arabic web pages on six commonly searched procedures. We entered six lay Arabic search terms into Google, each in a single session, and screened the records against predefined criteria. Three calibrated dental interns appraised the eligible pages with the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool for Printable Materials (PEMAT-P) and the four JAMA benchmarks, scoring each subscale on the applicable items as the User's Guide directs. Groups were compared with Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests with Dunn post-hoc comparisons, and effect sizes are reported. We screened 222 records and included 148. Of the 74 exclusions, most were purely commercial content (n = 39) or unedited machine translation (n = 34). Commercial providers published 79 pages (53.4%), non-profit and governmental bodies 68 (45.9%), and an academic institution 1 (0.7%). Mean understandability was 62.6% (SD 14.7), with 42 pages (28.6%) adequate, and mean actionability 28.4% (SD 25.4), with 8 (5.5%) adequate. Pages met a mean of 0.93 (SD 1.00) JAMA benchmarks, two (1.4%) meeting all four and 63 (42.6%) none. Currency was met most often (41.9%), disclosure least (12.8%). In exploratory comparisons, attainment varied across terms for benchmarks (H = 16.16, p = 0.006) and understandability (H = 13.99, p = 0.016), but commercial and non-profit pages did not differ on any outcome. Arabic content on these procedures was moderately understandable but rarely actionable, seldom attributed or dated, and almost never from an academic source. These findings describe pages retrieved by six lay Google searches, not Arabic web content as a whole. The remedy is for dental faculties, professional associations, and health authorities serving Arabic-speaking populations to publish dated, attributed, step-by-step material indexed under the lay terms patients search.
Indexed as
Identifiers
42879068What 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.