The information commitments toward web information among medical students in Taiwan

The purpose of this study was to investigate medical students' information commitments toward online web medical information. The sample consisted of 534 volunteer medical university students with internet experience from 6 medical universities in Taiwan. This study used the Information Commitment Survey (ICS) for an investigation of medical students' standards of judging online information, and their search strategies on the Web. The results showed that the ICS was deemed to be sufficiently reliable for assessing medical students' information commitments toward Web-based information. It was also found that gender difference existed in the students' usage of certain searching strategies. Another finding was that students with more Internet experience tended to utilize the 'elaboration' searching strategy while being oriented towards employing quite 'mixed' standards for judging online information. The results also revealed that medical students held less sophisticated information commitments than university students in general, particularly when comparing to the female students. The findings strongly suggest that medical students need additional training for using the Internet to seek information and that medical educators implementing Internet-assisted instructional activities need to find some methods to help medical students, especially the female students, to develop more sophisticated information commitments.