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Focus on scholarly content including full-text papers, conference proceedings, indexed journals, books, and book chapters from open access sources. Content is available in 38 languages, covering various subjects and disciplines. Free & Subscription Yes Knowledge E, Zendy
Unless the source exercises editorial control, e-prints and conference abstracts should be considered to be self-published. The above questions can be used to consider the reliability of self-published scientific material. See the policy on self-published sources at WP:SPS. Many of them are also primary sources, which should be treated with ...
Self-published books may be printed by a vanity press or a publisher that prints books by only that author. If the author works for a company, and the publisher is the employer, and the author's job is to produce the work (e.g., sales materials or a corporate website), then the author and publisher are the same.
Scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports for academic topics (see § Scholarship, above). Press releases from organizations or journals are often used by newspapers with minimal change; such sources are churnalism and should not be treated differently than the underlying press release.
Book publishers have little incentive to worry about facts since people generally buy books based on the author rather than the publisher. For this reason books are seldom very reliable sources. When you cite a newspaper, you are also relying on the author but mainly on the publication.
Scholarly books typically have a page or more of acknowledgments naming the people who assisted in finding, and evaluating sources, and helping the author avoid mistakes. Editors give a high priority to ensuring that the authors have dealt with the current standard scholarly historiography on the topic.
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.
Prior to the mid-20th century, individuals searching for published literature had to rely on printed bibliographic indexes, generated manually from index cards. "During the early 1960s computers were used to digitize text for the first time; the purpose was to reduce the cost and time required to publish two American abstracting journals, the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine ...