Assessing Website Reliability: No Verdict Possible

Find information on health conditions, wellness issues, and more in easy-to-read language on MedlinePlus, the up-to-date, trusted health information site from the NIH and the National Library of Medicine.

The website address matches the address on the certificate. The certificate is signed by a certificate authority that the browser recognizes as a "trusted" authority. If the browser senses a problem, it may present you with a dialog box that claims that there is an error with the site certificate. This may happen if the name the certificate is registered to does not match the site name, if you have chosen not to trust the company who issued the certificate, or if the certificate has expired.

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When reading an article or study, it's important to evaluate its sources to see if they’re credible. Look for appropriate citations to back up large claims. Additionally, credible sources often include the author's name and credentials to establish their expertise.

Criteria to evaluate information sources, including websites, developed by Meriam Library at California State University, Chico Currency: The timeliness of the information Relevance: The importance of the information for your needs Authority: The source of the information. Accuracy: The reliability, truthfulness and correctness of the content.

Is the web document linked to a federal agency (.gov), a non-profit site (.org), an educational institution (.edu), or a business (.com)?Always ask whether the organization sponsoring a particular site is a known, reliable, or suitable site for the document—a research center, for example, a college or university, or a government office. If you are going to cite information found on a website, it's important to know whether you can trust the accuracy of the facts (i.e., hard data, study results) under discussion in a particular document.

Additional tips for determining source reliability are available on our Evaluating News page and Evaluating Sources page. What is the purpose of the web site? Why is this information being provided? Is it: ... Is the publisher of the site likely to have any particular agenda (e.g. political, ideological, commercial)? ... When statistics and other types of factual data are presented are they cited so that they may be verified?

Are there peer-reviewed articles that support the claim? Search Google Scholar, PubMed, or your university library’s academic databases. Peer-reviewed journals undergo a formal evaluation process, which means experts have reviewed their claims. Do fact-checking websites confirm or debunk the claim?

Check a website is an easy-to-use online tool which helps you to determine whether a website is likely to be legitimate or a scam … before you visit it. Provided in the UK by Get Safe Online in conjunction with Cifas, ScamAdviser and our other partners, it cleverly uses an algorithm to provide a trust score based on more than 40 data sources as well as thousands of reports of malicious websites from law enforcement agencies, regulators and consumer brands every week.