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Many of the best sources are not available online, or are only available under subscription. For example, many books are not available online at all, and subscription to academic databases such as JSTOR can be fairly expensive. However, it is possible to use the open web to find many good sources to use in writing encyclopedia articles.
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. Rather than checking facts, newspaper editors will expect reporters to check their own facts and they'll fire them if they don't and reporters know this.
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.
However, reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject. Common sources of bias include political, financial, religious, philosophical, or other beliefs.
The reliability of these sources ranges from formal scientific reports, which can be the equal of the best reviews published in medical journals, to public guides and service announcements, which have the advantage of being freely readable but are generally less authoritative than the underlying medical literature.
While many of us are willing to help charities with some funds, we want our hard-earned money to go to good use. There are ways of determining if the charity you are giving to will actually spend ...
Google Books often offers readers a few sentences even when full access is not granted, and can help editors find reliable sources quickly, either by looking at the book's references or by citing the book itself. Check that a particular book is published by a reliable academic publishing house.
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