CAM Information

Wikimedia Foundation and NIH Meet to Discuss Health Information on the Web

On July 16, Wikimedia Foundation- the non-profit organization that runs Wikepedia.org- hosted its first ever U.S. Wikipedia Academy on the NIH Bethesda campus. The academy is a public outreach event created to teach participants how to contribute to Wikipedia and orient the audience to Wikipedia’s structures and community policies. NIH joined forces with Wikimedia to engage NIH subject matter experts to post to the site and to ensure that high quality medical and science information is available on the site.

Wikipedia contains nearly 13.5 million articles written in over 250 languages. In May, it served over 315 million unique visitors. The site manages, on average, more than 14 million page views per hour¹. The latest data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project states that 61% of Americans adults look online for health information.² The collaboration between NIH and the Wikimedia Foundation is a step in the direction of more accurate and reliable online health information.

The Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM) has joined the call for improving access to health information by creating its own entry on Wikipedia.org. OCCAM wants to raise awareness of the resources it can provide to the public and intends to continually update its entries along with other entries on CAM-related topics. Through multiple online channels, like the OCCAM Web site and Wikipedia.org, OCCAM is dedicated to communicating cancer CAM topics in a fashion that reaches the widest audience possible and enhances the public’s understanding of the evidence regarding cancer and CAM.

Find and Order NCI Publications More Easily

NCI has announced the launch of the new NCI Publications Locator Web site. A team from the NCI’s Office of Communication and Education (OCE) recently led efforts to redesign the interface, making it easier to find and order NCI publications. To ensure that the new site would be more user-friendly, the OCE team conducted usability and focus group testing. After a year of hard work, the result is a system with greater accessibility and advanced features.

Many improvements have been made to the NCI Publications Locator site. The new design has a similar look to NCI’s Web site, cancer.gov, which allows the user a familiar experience. From the homepage of the new site, a user finds lists of publications organized into categories that can be quickly scanned; an announcements section, which features new and updated publications; a search function; and A-Z quick links that take the user to publications with titles that begin with each letter.

Now, NCI Publications Locator site provides more information about each publication: NIH publication number; description; thumbnail image, if available; last review date; number of pages; format; language; target audience; a list of related products; and a link to the publication online.

Users can also order publications more easily with an improved search and advanced search function. A shopping cart area, where users can see their selected publications and quantity, is available as well as find a shopping cart icon indicating where they are in the ordering process. For users who would like to print publications, instead of ordering them, NCI Publications Locator offers separate PDFs of the NCI’s professionally designed covers and content for certain publications through its Contents and Covers service. Additionally, certain publication covers can be ordered in batches of twenty-five.

NCI currently offers 18 publications on CAM, which can be found by selecting “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” from the Subject list on the NCI Publications Locator home page. To order or view these CAM publications or those on other topics, visit https://cissecure.nci.nih.gov/ncipubs/home.aspx.