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Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic writing or research. Wikipedia is increasingly used by people in the academic community, from first-year students to distinguished professors, as an easily accessible tertiary source for information about anything and everything and as a quick "ready reference", to get a sense of a concept or idea.
The Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information provides free public access to over 266,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees.
However, as with all tertiary reference works, Wikipedia is not considered to be a reliable source as not everything in Wikipedia is accurate, comprehensive, or unbiased. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is intended to provide an overview of topics and indicate sources of more extensive and academic information.
Wikipedia has been the center of a much heated and critical debate in academia pertaining to the relevance, accuracy, and effectiveness of using information found online in academic research, especially in places where information is constantly being created, revised, and deleted by people of various backgrounds, ranging from experts to curious learners.
Historians carry out original research, often using primary sources. Historians often have a PhD or advanced academic training in historiography, but may have an advanced degree in a related social science field or a domain specific field; other scholars and reliable sources will typically use the descriptive label historian to refer to an historian.
The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources originated with the academic discipline of historiography. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events. [a] Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts.
A third-party source from one article may be treated as an auxiliary source in another, because the focus has changed. [6] Generally, any source that does not qualify as a reliable third-party source is grouped in this category. The use of these raw, first-hand, or out-of-date sources lends itself to inaccurate reporting, undue weight, and ...
Sources of information are commonly categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary sources.In brief, a primary source is one close to the event with firsthand knowledge (for example, an eyewitness); a secondary source is at least one step removed (for example, a book about an event written by someone not involved in it); and a tertiary source is an encyclopaedia or textbook that provides a ...