Poor Readability of Online Patient Resources Regarding Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy for Melanoma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Established guidelines recommend that patient educational materials should be set at no higher than a sixth-grade reading level to be considered adequately comprehensible to the general public. Our study objective was to assess the readability of online patient resources related to sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) as part of treatment for melanoma. Materials and methods The top 50 results from a Google search (search terms: "sentinel lymph node biopsy melanoma") were analyzed using seven established readability formulae in order to determine their level of adherence to current guidelines. Results We found that the readability of available online patient resources is currently very poor, with only 12% of the websites meeting the sixth-grade reading level criteria according to at least one measure, and 0% meeting the criteria according to all seven assessment tools. Furthermore, half of search results were peer-reviewed academic journal articles not intended for the general public. Discussion and conclusions Online patient resources related to SLNB carried out as part of melanoma treatment have poor readability. Several simple measures may be taken in order to make these resources more accessible and comprehensible to a broader audience. These resources should undergo ongoing evaluation, with the ultimate goal being improved readability and patient education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".