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This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) policy. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community .
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.
MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care.
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.
Examples of non-acceptable sources: Research papers, including clinical trial papers, are generally avoided, as they are communicating new findings, which may or may not be or become accepted knowledge in the field. Anything published by a predatory publisher or marginal journal (for the latter, being MEDLINE indexed is typically a minimum).
Both Wikipedia and MedlinePlus have lower content accuracy and more errors; however, MedlinePlus is simplest of all to read, at a 9th grade level. Significantly for eMedicine, Laraway and Rogers used PubMed, Medline Medical Journals.com and eMedicine as primary sources of information. [7]
The problem with primary vs. secondary sources in medicine, is that first, it is impossible to applicably quote a secondary source without first having quoted a primary source. Secondly, Primary Sources must pass scientific peer review in order to be published, and therefore are quite reliable despite what this policy attempts to allude to.
In general, I'd like to be a little more explicit on the fact that primary sources (journal articles reporting original findings) are a welcome and even necessary part of medical articles, but that the interpretation of such research must hew carefully to that provided in reliable secondary sources (reviews/textbooks). I've seen significant ...