American Association for Respiratory Care - committed to enhancing your professionalism as a respiratory care practitioner, improving your performance on the job, and helping you broaden the scope of knowledge essential to your success.
American Thoratic Society - medical association dedicated to advancing our clinical and scientific understanding of pulmonary diseases, critical illnesses and sleep-related breathing disorders.
Hardin MD (Hardin Meta Directory) - a "directory of directories" for health and medicine.
Mayo Health Clinic - provides useful and up-to-date information and tools that reflect the expertise and standard of excellence of Mayo Clinic.
Missouri Board of Respiratory Care - The licensing board for the State of Missouri where you can find application forms, approved CE courses, and other information.
Missouri Society for Respiratory Care - The MSRC is a Chartered Affiliate of the American Association for Respiratory Care, and is made up of respiratory therapists across the state.
National Board for Respiratory Care - a voluntary health certifying board which was created in 1960 to evaluate the professional competence of respiratory therapists.
RT Magazine - free access to the online journal for Respiratory Care Practitioners
Thorax Online -an international peer review journal for health professionals in all aspects of respiratory medicine.
U.S. National Library of Medicine Gateway - the world's largest medical library providing information and research services in all areas of biomedicine and health care. This link provides a global search function for PubMed, PubMed Central, and Medline Plus.
The World Wide Web has a lot to offer, but not all sources are equally valuable or reliable!
Consider the following when evaluating a website:
Consider the main purpose of the page. Web pages are not always easy to categorize and some may combine some of these categories.
Extensions(domains) on addresses can sometimes indicating reliability:
a .edu extension indicates a college or university
a .org extension indicates an organization
a .com indicates a commercial enterprise
These extensions are used in the U. S. only. Foreign sites, and some in the U.S., use a geographical extension or domain. These "extension" rules should only be applied in a general way. Some commercial sites contain high quality information but many are advertising a product or service and, therefore, are not objective sources. A person who works for the commercial enterprise may be reliable, although a person who is merely "renting" space on their web server may not be. Government sites usually have reliable information but remember that government also deals in propaganda and partisan views. Academic sites will most likely contain quality information suitable for research, but you must still check the author's background. An organization may be a legal entity that has an interest in providing reliable information. However, the information found on an organization's homepage may also be highly biased and one-sided
An author's affiliation is an important clue to the reliability of the information:
Look for any biographical statement about the author.
Look for an e-mail address or site address to determine affiliation.
Questions to ask about the author:
Don't take the information presented at face value. Web sites are rarely refereed or reviewed, as are scholarly journals and books:
Are the sources for any factual information clearly listed so they can be verified in another source? (If not, the page may still be useful to you as an example of the ideas of the organization, but it is not useful as a source of factual information).
Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors? (These kinds of errors not only indicate a lack of quality control, but can actually produce inaccuracies in information.)
Are the sponsor's biases clearly stated?
If there is any advertising on the page, is it clearly differentiated from the informational content?
Are there any indications that the material is kept current?
Is there an indication that the page has been completed, and is not still under construction?
Are there dates on the page to indicate:
-When the page was written?
-When the page was first placed on the Web?
-When the page was last revised?
Don’t see any date information on the page?
-In Netscape pull down “View” from the menu bar and select “Page information”
-In Internet Explorer pull down “File” from the menu bar and select “Properties”
-In Mozilla Firefox pull down “Tools” from the menu bar and select “Page Info”
Is it clear what topics the page intends to address?
Does the page succeed in addressing these topics, or has something significant been left out?
Is the point of view of the sponsor/author presented in a clear manner with its arguments well supported?
Are the links on the page relevant to the subject?
Does the content cover a specific time period or aspect of the topic, or strives to be comprehensive?
Is the site laid out clearly and logically with well organized subsections?
Is the writing style appropriate for the intended audience?
Is the site easy to navigate?
Is a search function offered?
Is the homepage easy to navigate?
Is the homepage logically organized?
Is the writing clear?
Are there numerous spelling or grammatical errors?
Are there errors in the use of HTML tags?
Do the links work?
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