Conclusions
MR, Media
Community pharmacists struggled to find high-quality electronic self-medication–related information sources under everyday practice conditions in the web group. This is of great importance as self-medication recommendations or simply the verification of statements should not be based on information resources of questionable quality. The search results of the EVInews group met many of the predefined standard quality criteria. Taken together, the findings suggest that there is a need for customized information sources for pharmacists. Evidence-based information tools such as the EVInews database may help in reducing the evidence-to-practice gap.We thank all the collaborators and participants of the survey as well as the ABDA (Federal Union of German Associations of Pharmacists e.V.) and Avoxa (Media Group of German Pharmacists GmbH) for financial support of the EVInews project. We furthermore express our gratitude to all expert panel participants (Simone Eisenhofer, Markus Herzig, Samira Hmaidi, and Susanne Schiek). JMA and MR received third-party funding from the ABDA (Berlin, Germany). We acknowledge the financial support from Leipzig University for Open Access Publishing.Conflicts of Interest: JMA is one of the EVInews newsletter authors and composed newsletters under the guidance of Thilo Bertsche. All authors developed the rating scheme.
This randomized study was only retrospectively registered, explained by authors with the following statement: "Since no patients were exposed to interventions in our study, we initially decided to not register our study prospectively. To meet transparency standards, we however decided to register our study retrospectively." The editor granted an exception from ICMJE rules mandating prospective registration of randomized trials, because the risk of bias appears low and the study was considered formative, guiding the development of the application. However, readers are advised to carefully assess the validity of any potential explicit or implicit claims related to primary outcomes or effectiveness, as retrospective registration does not prevent authors from changing their outcome measures retrospectively.Search-task health-related statements.Rating Scheme.Type and frequency distribution of web-based information sources.CONSORT-eHEALTH checklist (V 1.6.1).