How style, information depth and textual characteristics influence the usefulness of general practitioners' reviews

•Analysis of 234 reviews of health service providers.•Investigation of the impact of content, style and presentation on the usefulness.•Classification of what characterises most and least useful reviews. Online reviews provide increasingly important sources of information for different types of consumer decisions. The gaining popularity of online reviews in the realm of health services implies the need for a better understanding of their role in informed patient decision-making processes. This paper reports a qualitative study that investigates which textual and content elements are related to the perceived usefulness of online reviews for doctors (general practitioners). We investigated 234 online reviews and applied decision tree analysis to find patterns. The findings indicate that readers of online reviews for general practitioners are concerned with the whole content of the review and do not solely look at the valence or rating of a review. Furthermore, it was found that reviews with a more narrative or experiential style were overall perceived as more useful than more fact based or very short reviews. 在线评论为不同类型的消费者做决策提供了日益重要的信息来源。卫生服务领域的网上评论的日益普及意味着我们需要更好地了解这些信息在患者的知情决策过程中的作用。本文对一项质化研究进行了陈述，该研究探讨了哪些文字和内容决定了网上对医生（全科医生）的评论的感知有用性。我们调查了234个在线评论并做了决策树分析以找到某种模式。研究结果表明，网上对全科医生评论的读者们所关心的是评论的全部内容，而不是单纯地关注某一个评论的评价或评级。此外还发现，相对于更基于事实或较短的评论而言，更具有叙述性或根据经验而进行的评论在总体上来说被认为是更有用的。