This research paper is timely: the number of people who access health Web sites for either sickness relief or general good health fitness techniques is growing almost exponentially.

Elegant in its thoroughness, the research involves data from the human-computer interaction (HCI), medical, informatics, and decision-making fields. The authors use undisputed statistical techniques to explore their thesis. Their statistical tests include social network analysis, word frequency analysis, and an analysis of empirical outcomes.

The authors are primarily concerned with showing a correlation between credibility and trust, when searching Web sites for health information. They argue that credibility is a major facet of trust.

The authors find that, as far as Web sites are concerned, there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes user trust. Their research shows that the various research communities are divided: different fields of study use different language and factors when discussing and defining “trust.”

The authors’ findings indicate that more work needs to be done to develop a common definition for “trust” among research organizations. Aligned to this discovery is the reality that there is no common, unified authority for the discussion of, and research on, trust and its relationship to health sites.