Most hospitals in Pakistan have poor web presence

Islamabad

A majority of the hospitals in Pakistan have a poor Web presence, reveals the 'Ranking Web of World Hospitals,' a tool that shows the commitment of health organisations to electronic publication and dissemination of academic information related to medicine.

The following is the world ranking of Pakistani hospitals: CIDP International Foundation (1842), Jinnah Memorial Hospital (2400), Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (2836), Shifa International Hospital (3760), Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre (4064), Al Shifa Trust Eye Hospital (5109), Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (5911), Layton Rahmatulla Benevolent Trust Eye Hospital(7200), Liaquat National Hospital (7333), Allama Iqbal Medical College and Jinnah Hospital Lahore (7659), Indus Hospital (7679), Services Institute of Medical Sciences (9000), Fatima Memorial System (9190), Rehman Medical Institute (9549), Aadil Hospital (9621), Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre (10409), Tabba Heart Institute (11008), Lady Reading Hospital (11136), Sharif Medical City (11385), Dr Ziauddin Hospital Karachi (11385).

The 'Ranking Web of World Hospitals' is an initiative of Cyber metrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

These rankings are published from a purely academic point of view and should only be used as such. "The Web indicators applied do not measure the quality of treatment and health care offered by the hospitals. So please be aware that if you are looking for the best place to treat a health condition, this ranking is not appropriated for such a search," CSIC clarifies.

The objective of the initiative is to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. "If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, hospital authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications," CSIC states.

According to CSIC many hospitals, even in the developed countries, have a poor presence in the Web or no presence at all. About 5-10% of the institutions have no independent web presence, most of them located in developing countries. "This lack of valuable contents publicly available is really very concerning and it should not be longer acceptable in the 21st century," it maintains. "With these rankings we intend to provide extra motivation to researchers worldwide for publishing more and better scientific content on the Web, making it available to colleagues and people wherever they are located," CSIC maintains.

The 'Ranking Web of World Hospitals' is launched in a Beta phase, and it is intended that once it reaches its definitive version, it will be updated every 6 months (data collected in January and July and published one month later). The goal of the project is to convince academic and political communities of the importance of the web publication not only for dissemination of academic knowledge but also for measuring scientific activities, performance and impact.

The current objective of the ranking is to promote Web publication by hospitals. The ranking measures the volume, visibility and impact of web pages published by hospitals, with special emphasis in the scientific output (referred papers, conference contributions, pre-prints, monographs, thesis, reports) but also taking into account other materials (courseware, seminars or workshops documentation, digital libraries, databases, multimedia, personal pages) and the general information on the institution, their departments, research groups or supporting services and people working or attending courses.

The project intends to have true global coverage, not narrowing the analysis to a few hundreds of institutions (world-class hospitals) but including as many organisations as possible. "The only requirement in our international rankings is having an autonomous web presence with an independent web domain. This approach allows a larger number of institutions to monitor their current ranking and the evolution of this position after adopting specific policies and initiatives," CSIC informs.

The original aim of the ranking is to promote Web publication, not to rank institutions. The Web covers not only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community.