Library Research Guides: Bioethics: Find Web Resources

Find Websites

The Hastings Center
Founded in 1969, The Hastings Center was important in establishing the field of bioethics. It is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of research scholars from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, law, political science, and education.
NIH Department of Bioethics
The NIH Department of Bioethics is one of the nation's preeminent centers for bioethics scholarship and training. Since the Departments establishment in 1996, its members have consistently produced high-impact conceptual and empirical research published in leading journals, and have served as leaders in this evolving field.
Former Presidential Bioethics Commissions via Georgetown University
As a public resource, we offer on this page a list of all former U.S. national bioethics commissions (and one prominent international one), with all of their reports (and, where available, a downloadable copy of the report).

American Society for Bioethics & Humanities (ASBH)
The Society is an educational organization whose purpose is to promote the exchange of ideas and foster multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and inter-professional scholarship, research, teaching, policy development, professional development, and collegiality among people engaged in all of the endeavors related to clinical and academic bioethics and the health-related humanities.
Association for Medical Ethics (AME)
The purpose of the Association is to promote patient care and good, evidence-based medicine. The physicians of AME have joined together to provide increased public awareness on important issues such as the ethics of responsible patient care, and identification of the often-pervasive influence of the industry on many health care providers and their patients.
American Society of Law, Medicine, & Ethics (ASLME)
ASLME is a nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to provide high-quality scholarship, debate, and critical thought for professionals at the intersection of law, medicine, and ethics.

Evaluate Your Sources

Before using any information you should critically evaluate source, especially if it is from a website. Consider:

WHO?
- Who created this resource? In what way(s) are they qualified to speak about this topic? In what way(s) are they potentially biased?
WHAT?
- What is the resource content actually addressing? Does it balance conflicting points of view?
WHEN?
- When was the resource created? Is there a more current resource that could be used? Was the resource ever updated or maintained?
WHERE?
- Where was this resource published? Is the publisher reputable?
- Where did the author(s) get their information from? Do they accurately cite their sources?
- Where does the resource fall under the evidence pyramid?
- Where does it fit into the current scholarly conversation about your topic?
WHY?
- Why did the author create the resource? What purpose does the resource have? Who is it intended for?
- Why did you choose this source? In what way(s) does it match your research question?

Trust and Credibility in Web-Based Health Information: A Review and Agenda for Future Research
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2017-06-19, Volume 19, Number 6, Pages e218
The article seeks to present a profile of the research conducted on trust and credibility in Web-based health information (WHI) seeking, to identify the factors that impact judgments of trustworthiness and credibility, and to explore the role of demographic factors affecting trust formation.
Consumer Evaluation of the Quality of Online Health Information: Systematic Literature Review of Relevant Criteria and Indicators
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2019-05-02, Volume 21, Number 5, Pages e12522
This review aims to identify how consumers assign value and worth to health information on the internet and what information they use to support this evaluation. Using this information, the authors try to provide guidelines for designing consumer health information systems.
Consumers’ Evaluation of Web-Based Health Information Quality: Meta-analysis
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2022-04-28, Volume 24, Number 4, Pages e36463
This paper aims to identify the antecedents and consequences of consumers’ evaluation of web-based health information quality as a means to consolidate the related research stream and to inform future studies on web-based health information quality.

Ask yourself whether the resource you found applies to your clinical question. To evaluate it, you can use the PICO framework:

P	Patient/Problem	How would you describe a group of patients similar to yours? What are the most important characteristics of the patient?
I	Intervention/Exposure/Prognostic Factor	What main intervention are you considering? What do you want to do with this patient?
C	Comparison	What is the main alternative being considered, if any?
O	Outcome	What are you trying to accomplish, measure, improve or affect?

Once you've chosen a resource to use in your research, you need to delve into the details of the article in order to figure out whether it's an applicable and reputable source. The resources listed below can help you with the critical appraisal process.

CASP Checklists (Critical Appraisal Skills Program)
This set of eight critical appraisal tools are designed to be used when reading research.
CATmaker (Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine)
CATmaker is a computer-assisted critical appraisal tool, which helps you create Critically Appraised Topics (CATs), for the key articles you encounter about Therapy, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Aetiology/Harm and Systematic Reviews of Therapy.
Critical Appraisal Worksheets (Duke Medical Center Library & Archives)
Appraisal worksheets from the medical school at Duke University.