Emergency Medical & Health Services: Finding websites

There is much general distrust about information available to the public on the World Wide Web.  Some of the concern is valid; anyone at any time can create a website about anything, with or without the experience or education an authority on a topic should have. 

For all of its "untamed" nature the web contains a great deal of reliable, authoritative information.

This page is dedicated to helping you find some of those sources on your own.

You may find scholarly works out on the "free" Web.  Not all of them will be available in full text.  (Results that have links to the right of the article record, link to full text.)  Try the Google Scholar search box below. If you find an article you like that is not full text, note the journal that it comes from, and find out if we subscribe to that journal in the Library.

Here are a few ideas for web sites with reliable information.  The information is reliable, but not necessarily academic or scholarly.  Much of the information is directed at the general public, but there are also technical articles and presentations--particularly if you dig a bit. Many of your topics are covered at one or more of these sites.

Things to ask yourself when evaluating a website:

• Is the author of the website clearly identified? (an author could be an organization, such as the NAEMT) If the author is not clearly identified, the author could have something to hide.

• Is there an "About" link clearly describing the author's credentials and purpose for creating the website?

• What is the domain (.com; .org; .gov; .edu)? Generally, .com are commercial sites dedicated in some way to making money.  Since only governments and schools can have .gov and .edu domains, you know these are the official sites of the sponsoring institution, such as http://www.yale.edu versus http://www.yale.com. The .org domain is trickier.  Generally non-profit organizations use .org, such as The American Heart Association, but anyone can use the .org domain, so use care.

• Is the language professional and neutral? Or, is there emotional or biased language?

• Does the author use poor spelling and grammar? Are there exclamation points(!)?  None of these are present in reliable and authoritative websites.

You can search the web by domain to limit your results to information from the government, from education institutions, and non-profit organizations (although anyone can use a .org domain on their website, so scrutinize these sites a little more heavily).

What can you expect to find from such a search? For this topic, results from National Institutes of Health (NIH) are common (mostly research articles). Results also include items such as protocols/recommendations/position statements from health departments and EMS systems around the United States.

As with any source, check the dates. Typically choose material that has been published within the last 3-5 years. Always search to find out if there is an updated version of anything you find.