Credibility, Quality of Information, Readability, Accuracy, Clarity, and Comprehensiveness of Online Information on Achilles Tendinopathy
Tendinitis, Tendinosis, Tendon, Pain, Overuse, Knowledge Translation
Achilles tendinopathy is a disorder characterized by pain and tendon thickening that affects both sedentary individuals and athletes. It is a debilitating musculoskeletal disorder that affects the ability to practice physical activities and sports, with a significant impact on the quality of life of affected individuals. The internet search for health-related information, especially about musculoskeletal conditions, has increased 5-fold in the last 10 years. However, studies evaluating the accuracy, scope, and credibility of internet content about musculoskeletal disorders such as low back pain, osteoarthritis, and patellofemoral pain report that information available on the internet is not in line with scientific evidence. To our knowledge, there are no studies in the literature that have systematically evaluated the information available on the internet on Achilles tendinopathy. Our aim is to explore the quality, credibility, precision, clarity, comprehensiveness, and readability of the sites identified in Google® searches on Achilles tendinopathy. This is a cross-sectional observational study using a sample of sites identified in Google® searches related to Achilles tendinopathy. Two members of the research group will search the websites and the search results will be combined and limited to the first 40 websites in the search. Each website will be evaluated for credibility, information quality, readability, accuracy, clarity, and comprehensiveness of the content by 2 raters. Data will be analyzed using IBM SPSS to calculate the rate of agreement between raters, intraclass correlation coefficient and descriptive statistics.