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Many of the best sources are not available online, or are only available under subscription. For example, many books are not available online at all, and subscription to academic databases such as JSTOR can be fairly expensive. However, it is possible to use the open web to find many good sources to use in writing encyclopedia articles.
A Guide to information sources (or a bibliographic guide, a literature guide, a guide to reference materials, a subject gateway, etc.) is a kind of metabibliography. Ideally it is not just a listing of bibliographies , reference works and other source texts , but more like a textbook introducing users to the information sources in a given field ...
Other sources may be tempting and easy to find, but should be avoided. Poor sources include: Blog posts and social media; Press releases and promotional material; Official websites; Self-published materials; While it can be useful to run a web search to help you find good sources (such as books or scholarly articles), most search results won't ...
Look through the journals sources page for more ideas on how to find the article. Reach out to the author(s) of the research paper by email and ask them for a copy. Note that websites like Sci-Hub offer free and direct access to academic journal articles, but there are legal questions about their use and neither the Wikimedia Foundation nor the ...
Sources that are reliable for some material are not reliable for other material. For instance, otherwise unreliable self-published sources are usually acceptable to support uncontroversial information about the source's author. You should always try to use the best possible source, particularly when writing about living people.
Often, local public or research libraries will be able to help find a source in their own collection, or through inter-library loan programs where libraries share copies of resources. Wikipedia also has its very own community forum for sharing sources , and if you're an active editor there are free accounts available through the Wikipedia ...
Google Books often offers readers a few sentences even when full access is not granted, and can help editors find reliable sources quickly, either by looking at the book's references or by citing the book itself. Check that a particular book is published by a reliable academic publishing house.
But any editor should feel free to combine them, and doing so is the best practice on Wikipedia. Citations to different pages or parts of the same source can also be combined (preserving the distinct parts of the citations), as described in Help:References and page numbers. Any method that is consistent with the existing citation style (if any ...