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Biomedical information must be based on reliable, third-party published secondary sources, and must accurately reflect current knowledge.This guideline supports the general sourcing policy with specific attention to what is appropriate for medical content in any Wikipedia article, including those on alternative medicine.
A type of source that is good for scientific information is not usually as reliable for political information, and vice versa. Since Wikipedia's readers may make medical decisions based on information found in our articles, [ 1 ] we want to use high-quality sources when writing about biomedical information.
Ideal sources for biomedical information include general or systematic reviews in reliable, independent, published sources, such as reputable medical journals, widely recognised standard textbooks written by experts in a field, or medical guidelines and position statements from nationally or internationally reputable expert bodies.
The majority of people in the United States use the internet as a source of health information. [48] The third most common activity for information seeking online is looking up health or medical information. [49] One 2013 study suggested that 22% of healthcare searches online direct users to Wikipedia. [50]
"Wikipedia's articles are not intended to provide medical advice, but are important and widely used as a source of health information.[1] Therefore, it is vital that any biomedical information in articles be based on reliable, third-party, published secondary sources and accurately reflect current knowledge."
A type of source that is good for scientific information is not usually as reliable for political information, and vice versa. Since Wikipedia's readers may make medical decisions based on information found in our articles, [ 1 ] we want to use high-quality sources when writing about biomedical information.
PubMed is a free database including primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
It also applies to things that most people wouldn't consider to be "medical information", e.g., non-human/pre-clinical research. Just about any sentence that begins "A study in mice showed that..." probably isn't "medical information", but it is covered by this guideline. WhatamIdoing 01:20, 10 July 2010 (UTC)