What to do if there’s a nuclear attack? A quality and readability analysis of websites

The internet, with increased worldwide use, represents a practical and easy source of access to information in every field. This content analysis study aimed to investigate the quality and readability of the content of the websites related to nuclear attack protection.

Search terms related to nuclear attack protection were used in the Google search engine and 78 websites meeting the criteria were included in the analysis. Websites were classified according to their typology and using various tools for their quality (JAMA benchmark scoring), reliability (HONcode certification), and readability (Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Gunning-Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook Index (SMOG)) were analyzed.

Only 3.85% of websites had a HONcode certificate. Regarding website typology, health portals (32.1%) had the most websites followed by news (26.9%) and commercial (6.4%) and scientific journals–books (5.1%) had the least. According to the JAMA score, health portals and news websites (76.9%) were of high quality, but average and difficult to read. There was no significant relationship between high quality and readability parameters.

Overall, the websites are mostly in the health portal and news typology and of high quality, but they are not easily readable and have deficient reliability standards.