Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles

Guidelines for articles related to Anatomy can be found at this subpage of WikiProject Anatomy.

This page proposes style guidelines for editing medical articles. Of course, the general rules from the Wikipedia:Manual of Style also apply when writing medical articles. The first chapter of this page deals with some frequently encountered issues in medicine-related articles; the second chapter provides editors with an overview of resources (both on Wikipedia and elsewhere online) that can be used in this field.

Issues for medical articles

This policy/guideline proposal in a nutshell:

Article titles use the scientific or medical name. Write for the average reader and a general audience – not doctors or patients. Explain medical jargon or use plain English instead if possible. Don't use disclaimers. The Medical disclaimer is part of the General disclaimer, and there is a policy against disclaimer templates. Think twice before adding the latest research findings to articles. Reliable sources, and more specifically secondary sources, are preferred. A notable cases section should be absent in most articles and is sometimes hard to deal with.

Naming conventions

See also: Wikipedia:Naming conventions

The article title should be the scientific or medical name rather than the lay term and where an eponym has been superseded. These alternative names may be offered in the lead section. Create redirects to your article to help those searching with the other names (for example, heart attack redirects to myocardial infarction, with appropriate explanations of the latter). Where there are differences between English speakers, an international standard should be sought to mediate. Some examples include:

• Diseases - The World Health Organisation International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD 10).
• Drugs - The International Nonproprietary Name (INN).
• Anatomy - The Terminologia Anatomica.

The Audience

See also: Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible, and Wikipedia:Explain jargon

Wikipedia is written for the general reader. It is an encyclopedia, not a comprehensive medical or pharmaceutical resource or first-aid manual. Whilst doctors and patients may find much of interest, they are not the target audience.

How to spot you are writing for (other) doctors:

• You use the word "patients" when describing those who have a medical condition.
• You use jargon when perfectly good plain English words exist (for example, "renal" rather than "kidney").
• You are tempted to lift text from your medical textbooks.
• You remove any mention of non-mainstream treatments or practices (sometimes you must write for the enemy).

How to spot you are writing for (other) patients:

• You use the word "you" when describing those who have a medical condition.
• You give advice, particularly for when medical help should be sought or is required.
• You are tempted to lift text from a patient information leaflet or website.
• You mention treatments or practices that you've read about in a newspaper or from personal experience.
• You add "helpful" external links, such as forums, self-help groups and local charities.

When mentioning technical terms (jargon) for the first time, try to provide a short plain English explanation in parentheses if possible. If the concept is too elaborate, wikilink to other articles (or Wiktionary entries). For terms related to anatomical position, you can link to Anatomical terms of location, e.g. [[Anatomical terms of location|lateral]]. Alternatively, if the technical word is not used again in the article, it may be appropriate to use plain English and place the technical term between brackets. The etymology of a word can be interesting and can help the reader understand and remember it.

Sometimes, information is specific to one country. For example, drug licensing or health service provision. Make an effort to maintain an international perspective, for example by seeking out sources from other countries.

Careful language

Some terms can be are open to misinterpretation and should be wikilinked, avoided or carefully explained. Medical usage can sometimes differ to that of the general public.

• Drug usage can be "approved", "indicated" and "off-label". Approval is a legal issue, indications are a medical one. A drug can be approved for one use but be indicated for several others. Off-label use is not an illegal activity.
• The phrase "psychologically addictive" has so many conflicting definitions that it's essentially meaningless. Replace the term with something specific. If you want to convey that a drug does not cause tolerance, or that its withdrawal syndrome is not life-threatening, then state that.
• Sometimes positive and negative medical test results can have, respectively, negative and positive implications for the patient. For example, a negative breast cancer screening test is very positive for the woman being screened.

Ensure your language does not cause offence.

• Avoid saying that people "suffer" from an illness or symptom. This word implies a helplessness that many patient groups find unhelpful.
• Not all medical conditions are viewed as being entirely disadvantageous by those who have them.
• Be careful not to define a person or group of people by their medical condition. For example, seizures are epileptic, people are not.

When quoting statistics, ensure you have defined your usage precisely.

• Definitions of what constitutes drug abuse vary.
• Do not confuse patient-group prevalence figures with those for the general public.

Disclaimers (not necessary)

There is discussion about whether disclaimers (e.g. Wikipedia does not give medical info, consult with a doctor,etc., for example this discussion) should be used in medical articles. Some people think they should be used. However, the general policy is to not use other disclaimers than the main disclaimer, which can be accessed from any page on Wikipedia.

Research information

If the latest research findings arrived in your post-box today, great! But as you add them to an article make sure they are supported by background content. You might also want to consider waiting until other researchers have confirmed it, or it is integrated in review articles or medical books. If desired, you can broadly signify a trend without endeavouring to keep the reference list completely up-to-date with the very latest studies.

References and footnotes

Ideally every medical article should have

• a few historical references (e.g. first reported case, discovery of pathogenesis)
• one or two recent systematic reviews in core journals (like Nature, Science, Cell,...).
• Textbooks are important as secondary sources.
• Some databases (like OMIM or eMedicine) provide in-depth peer-reviewed information (but remember, nobody's perfect).

Ideally any online reference will be to an open sites that do not restrict access to non-professionals or require a subscription. Template:PMC (see below) may be very helpful to this end.

• References - are sources used as background to a whole topic and should be included as a bulleted list (start each line with an asterisk '*'). Citation details may be manually formatted, but the use of generic citation templates helps standardise their appearance.
• Footnotes - are sources provided to expand or verify specific details in the text. The same manual or template formating of citation details is used, but additional markup is needed to generate the footnote numbered links (e.g. ^[1]). WP:Footnotes describes cite.php, the latest of several methods, as summarised below.

Reliable sources in medicine

Examples are provided in the Good online resources section below.

In general, Wikipedia articles should rely on reliable secondary sources, although the section below describes mainly primary sources. Good secondary sources are, for example, medicine textbooks.

Peer-reviewed scientific publications

See: Wikipedia:Reliable sources.

Avoid citing the popular press

The popular press generally does not cover medicine well. Articles in newspapers and popular magazines generally lack the context to judge experimental results. They tend to overemphasize the certainty of any result, for instance presenting a new experimental medicine as the "discovery of the cure" of a disease. Also, newspapers and magazines frequently publish articles about scientific results before those results have been peer-reviewed or reproduced by other experimenters. They also tend not to report adequately on the methodology of scientific work, or the degree of experimental error. Thus, popular newspaper and magazine sources are generally not reliable sources for science and medicine articles.

Notable cases section

See also: Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and Lists of people.

This section should be absent in most articles. Sometimes, this list can expand beyond control and become bigger then the article itself, or it may be hard to acertain if some celebrities really have the condition. The following rules of thumb apply:

• "Articles about living persons require a degree of sensitivity and must adhere strictly to Wikipedia's content policies." This probably expands to the recently deceased.
• "Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. Unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should be removed immediately from both the article and the talk page. Responsibility for justifying controversial claims rests firmly on the shoulders of the person making the claim." This is also covered under Wikipedia:Verifiability.
• "Selected lists of people should be selected for importance/notability in that category and should have Wikipedia articles (or the reasonable expectation of an article in the future)." However exceptions to the requirement of notability in that category is possible, since it also states: "List of Elbonians would include persons who are famous in any category and who belong to Elbonia." The notability criterium is covered under Wikipedia:Notability (people) and for fictional characters maybe Wikipedia:Notability (fiction).
• An option that might satisfy everyone is to create a separate list article and link it, when the list contains enough info to stand on it's own.
• Maybe "notable cases" or "Notable individuals" is a better header than "Famous people with DISEASE_X" or "People famous because of FEATURE_Y". Similar sections may be "DISEASE_X in popular culture", "Cultural references" or others.

Resources

Boilerplate articles with appropriate headings and infoboxes can be found here.

Infobox Drugs

You can find it at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Drugs#Infobox. An excellent example can be found in the article on Paracetamol.

Infobox Disease

A tutorial on how to use the infobox is available at Template:Infobox Disease. An excellent example can be found in the article on Down syndrome.

Sections - diseases/disorders

For consistency, the top level headers should be limited to those specified below in clinical articles. The order below is recommended but in some cases it may be appropriate to present the sections in a different order (for example, if a disease is largely eradicated, then the history of the disease may be more important than the symptoms).

• Classification
• Signs and symptoms
• Causes or Genetics
• Pathophsiology or Mechanism
• Diagnosis
• Treatment or Management
• Prognosis (social impact may also be discussed)
• Prevention or Screening
• Epidemiology
• History
• Cultural references
• See also (avoid if possible, use wikilinks in the main article)
• Notes
• References
• Further reading or Bibliography (paper resources such as books, not web sites).
• External links (avoid if possible)

Remember that etiology is not plain English. Characteristic biopsy findings can be described in the diagnosis section.

Sections - medications

The lead should highlight the name of the drug as per normal guidelines. The BAN or USAN variant may also be mentioned, with the word in bold. The initial brand name and manufacturer follows, in parentheses. Indicate the drug class and family and the main indications. The External links section is a magnet for online pharmacy spam and should be avoided if at all possible.

Try to avoid cloning drug formularies such as the BNF and online resources like RxList and Drugs.com. Extract the pertinent information rather than just dumping low-level facts in a big list. For example, a long list of side effects is largely useless without some idea of which are common or serious. It can be illuminating to compare the drug with others in its class, or with older and newer drugs. Think twice before including detailed dosage and titration information. Often such details border on trivia, can be country-specific and become quickly out-of-date or easily subject to uninformed edits.

• History
• Indications
• Chemistry
• Mechanism of action
• Effects
• Side effects
• Interactions
• Contraindications
• Metabolism or Pharmacokinetics
• Toxicity
• Withdrawal
• Overdose
• Physical properties
• Legal status
• Veterinary uses
• Cultural references
• See also (avoid if possible)
• Notes
• References
• Further reading
• External links (avoid if possible)

Navigation template

An overview of navigation templates from Wikiproject Drugs is available here.

References and footnotes

Further guidance is available at Wikipedia:Citing sources, Wikipedia:Footnotes and Wikipedia:Guide to layout.

Use of PubMed

Abstracts of most medical journals are freely available at PubMed which includes a means of searching the MEDLINE database.

• The PubMed site is easily accesible through www.pubmed.org.
• To add a link to a PubMed article number (but without the whole reference), use: PMID xxxxxxxxx . Wikipedia automatically recognises "PMID", and will automatically provide a correct link to the abstract. However, try to use complete references instead of just a PMID-link

For example: <ref name=hedley>Hedley AA, Ogden CL, Johnson CL, et al. 2004. Prevalence of overweight and obesity among US children, adolescents, and adults, 1999–2002. ''JAMA'' ; '''291''': 2847–50. PMID 15199035</ref>.

• You can also link to freely available articles in the PubMed Central using {{PMC|xxxxxxxxx}}.

Some tools have been created to help add a full reference to wikipedia articles:

• Diberri's tools can be used to convert a PMID reference number, DrugBank or HUGO number to a wikipedia template:cite journal reference.
• You can add Wouterstomp's bookmarklet that uses Diberri's tool to make a wikipedia reference when used on a PubMed abstract page.

Good online resources

See also: #Reliable sources in medicine

This section describes good online resources, with links to templates you can use for referencing (the template syntaxis is often explained on the template page). Note that the most important ones are integrated in {{Infobox Disease}}.

• OMIM ({{OMIM}} and {{OMIM2}}) provides a lot of useful info with regards to genetic diseases.
• MedlinePlus ({{MedlinePlus}} and {{MedlinePlus2}}) has encyclopedic content in plain English from the NIH.
• eMedicine ({{eMedicine}} and {{eMedicine2}}) is a very big and reliable source.
• Diseases Database ({{DiseasesDB}}).

• WhoNamedIt ({{WhoNamedIt}}) is an excellent reference for eponyms in medicine.
• GPnotebook ({{GPnotebook}}) is a UK website which provides an easy access for general practitioners and may be an interesting source.
• SUNY Downstate Medical Center ({{SUNYAnatomyFigs}}) has an excellent set of online anatomic preparations.

• National Organisation of Rare Disorders
• Merck Manuals
• The Virtual Hospital
• Ganfyd.org : ganfyd is a UK project, using mediawiki and restricted to qualified people (as a reaction to medical articles in wikipedia that can be edited by anyone). They have some 1600 medical articles.

Using (stub-)categories

Categories

At the end of the article, place use [[Category:THECATEGORY]] in all the categories it belongs in, but please use the lowest appropriate sub-level.

Useful top-levels to start looking under include:

• Category:Medicine
• Category:Diseases
• Category:Medical treatments
• Category:Drugs

More can be found on this subpage of the medicine portal.

Stub categories

You can choose suitable stub category templates from this page.