The Internet for Pediatricians

Abstract

1. S. Andrew Spooner, MD* 2. Kent R. Anderson† 1. 2. *Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Children’s Hospital, Birmingham, AL. 3. 4. †Director, Division of Medical Journals & Professional Periodicals, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, IL. Type the word “pediatrics” into one of the more robust search engines on the World-Wide Web, and you will retrieve more than 90,000 different sites that refer to the specialty in some manner. With more than 5 million different destinations on the Web (and 80,000 being added every week), the growth of this information source and communication tool is remarkable. However, the quality and reliability of information can be uneven, despite vast improvements in the offerings over the past 1 to 2 years, and sites still fall into disrepair when their champions lose interest or funding. To help readers sort through this daunting information repository, the editors of Pediatrics in Review invited us to highlight some of the primary touchstones on the Web for pediatricians and to point to other sites that we believe offer excellent content, useful features, timely information, and interesting perspectives. The following list is by no means exhaustive, and it is not intended to represent a “best of” list. It is simply a list of stable, useful, and intriguing sites that can serve as a fine collection of online resources and a springboard for further investigations for the pediatric health care specialist. We organized most of this list according to clinical categories used by the American Board of Pediatrics and by the AAP’s PREP program. We then focused on sites that have one or more of the following priorities apparent in their design: