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A type of source that is good for scientific information is not usually as reliable for political information, and vice versa. Since Wikipedia's readers may make medical decisions based on information found in our articles, [ 1 ] we want to use high-quality sources when writing about biomedical information.
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.
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.
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.
This is an explanatory essay about Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). 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 .
In medicine, primary sources include clinical trials, which test new treatments; secondary sources include meta-analyses that bring together the results from many clinical trials and attempt to arrive at an overall view of how well a treatment works. It is usually best to use reviews and meta-analyses where possible, as these give a balanced ...
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).
If a source is reliable for a statement, then that's good enough, even if it would be possible to replace it with a gold-plated source that supports exactly the same good content. The most basic requirement of a guideline on sourcing is to identify the line between "barely good enough" and "not quite good enough".