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A reliable source is one that presents a well-reasoned theory or argument supported by strong evidence. Reliable sources include scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books written by researchers for students and researchers, which can be found in academic databases and search engines like JSTOR and Google Scholar.
Here are links to some sources of information about Advanced source searching. PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles or to systematic reviews ) The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine .
Independent sources ; General essays. Reliable sources checklist (WP:RSVETTING) Cherrypicking (WP:CHERRYPICK) Potentially unreliable sources ; Reliable source examples ; Topic-specific essays. Identifying reliable sources (history) Identifying reliable sources (law) Identifying reliable sources (science)
The following examples cover only some of the possible types of reliable sources and source reliability issues, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Proper sourcing always depends on context; common sense and editorial judgment are an indispensable part of the process.
Whether a source is usable also depends on context. 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 ...
Contested material is just material that another editor has made a reasonable challenge to or where sources disagree. (Whether a person was born on April 19 or April 20 might be contested but it's not an ideological issue.) If it's not contentious, the source is only going to be wrong because of failure of diligence.
Wikipedia does not use these terms exactly like academics use them. There are at least two ways in which the term secondary source is used on Wikipedia. This page deals primarily with the classification of reliable sources in terms of article content. The classification used specifically for notability is addressed in a separate section at the end.
Reliable sources allow editors to verify that claims in an article are accurate. The higher the quality of the source for the statement it backs up, the more likely that statement is to be accurate. Independent sources help editors to write neutrally and to prove that the subject has received note. Wherever possible, editors should aim to use ...