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Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)

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See also: Wikipedia:Reliable_sources and Wikipedia:No original research.

Wikipedia's medical articles should use reliable published sources. These guidelines supplement the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Reliable sources. The ideal source would be a general or systematic review in a reputable medical journal, or a widely recognised standard textbook written by experts in their field. It is also useful to reference seminal papers on the subject, as part of documenting the history of the subject.

Some definitions

See also: Wikipedia:Reliable sources#Types of source material
  • A primary source in medicine is one where the authors participated in research or documented their personal experiences. They examined the patients, injected the rats or filled the test tubes, or at least supervised those who did. Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources. Most medical journals have high editorial standards and ensure research papers are peer reviewed.
  • A secondary source in medicine summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to give an overview on a medical speciality. Review papers and textbooks are examples of secondary sources. A good secondary source from a reputable publisher will be written by an expert in the field and be editorially or peer reviewed. Journalists writing in the popular press, and marketing departments who issue press releases tend to write poor secondary source material.
  • A tertiary source usually summarizes secondary sources. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources.

In general, Wikipedia's medical articles should use published reliable secondary sources whenever possible. Reliable primary sources may be used only with great care, because it's easy to misuse them. For that reason, edits that rely on primary sources should only make descriptive claims that can be checked by anyone without specialist knowledge. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a secondary source.

Periodicals

Periodicals include newspapers, magazines and journals. The very latest research is often published first here. Where an archive is provided however, then many decades of research can be accessed.

Medical journals

These are a natural choice as a source for up-to-date information for medical articles. They contain a mixture of primary and secondary sources, as well as less technical material such as biographies. Although almost all such material will count as a reliable source, not all the material is equally useful.

Core journals

Impact factor is a crude guideline to a journal's authority.[1] If the articles in the top journals tend to be cited most often by other expert authors, then it is not a bad idea to do likewise on Wikipedia. The core general medical journals include

Core basic science and biology journals include

Additionally, an authoritative bibliograpy of medical books and journals recommended by medical librarians is the Brandon/Hill Selected List of Print Books and Journals. [2]

Article type

Journal articles come in many types: original research, reviews, editorials, book reviews, correspondence, biographies and eulogies. Research papers are, of course, primary sources. A general review of a subject by an expert in the field makes a good secondary source. Such reviews often contain no original research but can make interpretations and draw conclusions from primary sources that no Wikipedia editor would be allowed to do. A systematic review is both a primary and secondary source — it sumarizes other papers but it does so in order to research the field and possibly come to a novel conclusion.

Popular science magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American sometimes feature articles on medical subjects. Whilst not peer reviewed, their advantage is that the material is explained in plain English.

Newspapers

The quality of newspaper coverage of medicine ranges from excellent to irresponsible, and they should be verified like any other sources. Even peer-reviewed journals like the New England Journal of Medicine cite articles in newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Some tabloids, like the New York Daily News, have a reputation for careful fact-checking and knowledgeable reporters; others do not. Newspapers should be judged on the facts, not on prejudices. Some academic organizations that evaluate news coverage are Health News Review (U.S.), Media Doctor (Australia), and Media Doctor (Canada). The British Medical Journal reviews U.K. media coverage.

Books

Medical textbooks

Medical textbooks published by the academic press are an excellent secondary source. Ensure the book is up-to-date, unless a historical perspective is required.

These are usually tertiary sources, but there are exceptions. Some well known and respected popular science authors include Oliver Sacks, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.

Online

Reliable references

Background reading

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