Findings of analysis of criteria
Our search yielded 22 criteria sets within the project’s scope. These 22 criteria sets contained 466 criteria elements for assessing health websites. Table 2 shows the "density" of criteria, i.e., the number of criteria elements in each domain as a percentage of the total of all criteria elements contained within all 22 criteria sets. Almost two-thirds of criteria addressed content validity (27%), content accessibility (19%), and site transparency or credibility (17%). Table 3 lists the top 10 most frequent specific criteria (which appeared in almost half or more of the 22 criteria sets). Table 4 shows the number of criteria sets containing each of the 115 meta-criteria elements.

Findings of evaluations of criteria sets utility
None of the 22 criteria sets examined met all of our evaluation criteria; 4 sets met 5 of 6 evaluation criteria. See table 5.Three-quarters of the criteria sets defined their purpose clearly, but only 18% in operational terms; none reported reliability testing. See table 6. Only one-quarter of the criteria sets evaluated stated they were intended for use by consumers. Of these sets, we rated 40% (2 sets: [2,3]) as being consumer-friendly. One of these sets [3] met all of our top-level evaluation criteria except reported reliability testing.

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