User:CFCF/sandbox/TKIM

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Basic advice

Respect secondary sources

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Further information:
Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary and secondary sources

Primary sources should not be cited with intent of "debunking", contradicting, or countering any conclusions made by secondary sources.

original research, and Wikipedia is not a venue for open research
. Controversies or uncertainties in medicine should be supported by reliable secondary sources describing the varying viewpoints. Primary sources should not be aggregated or presented without context in order to undermine proportionate representation of opinion in a field. If material can be supported by either primary or secondary sources – the secondary sources should be used. Primary sources may be presented together with secondary sources.

Findings are often touted in the popular press as soon as original, primary research is reported, before the scientific community has analyzed and commented on the results. Therefore, such sources should generally be entirely omitted (see

RCTs
with surprising results), they should be described appropriately as from a single study:

"A large, NIH-funded study published in 2010 found that selenium and Vitamin E supplements increased risk of prostate cancer; they were previously thought to prevent prostate cancer." (citing PMID 20924966)

Given time a review will be published, and the primary sources should preferably be exchanged for the review. Using secondary sources then allows facts to be stated with greater reliability:

"Supplemental Vitamin E and selenium increase the risk of prostate cancer." (citing PMID 23552052)

If no reviews on the subject are published in a reasonable amount of time, then the content and primary source should be removed.

A reason to avoid primary sources in the biomedical field – especially papers reporting results of in vitro experiments – is that they are often not replicable[1][2][3] and are therefore unsuitable for use in generating encyclopedic, reliable biomedical content. Drug discovery scientists at Bayer in 2011 reported that they were able to replicate results in only ~20 to 25% of the prominent studies they examined;[4] scientists from Amgen followed with a publication in 2012 showing that they were only able to replicate 6 (11%) of 53 high-impact publications and called for higher standards in scientific publishing.[5] The journal Nature announced in April 2013 that in response to these and other articles showing a widespread problem with reproducibility, it was taking measures to raise its standards.[6] Further, the fact that a claim is published in a refereed journal need not make it true. Even well-designed randomized experiments will occasionally (with low probability) produce spurious results. Experiments and studies can produce flawed results or even fall victim to deliberate fraud (e.g. the Retracted article on dopaminergic neurotoxicity of MDMA and the Schön scandal.)

Summarize scientific consensus

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Martin Rimm.) Be careful of material published in disreputable journals or disreputable fields. (See: Sokal affair
.)

Wikipedia policies on the

WHO), in textbooks, or in some forms of monographs
. Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, such views must be presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field. Additionally, the views of tiny minorities need not be reported.

Finally, make readers aware of controversies that are stated in reliable sources. A well-referenced article will point to specific journal articles or specific theories proposed by specific researchers.

Assess evidence quality

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When writing about treatment efficacy, knowledge about the quality of the evidence helps distinguish between minor and major views, determine

Studies can be categorized into levels of evidence,[7] and editors should rely on high-quality evidence, such as systematic reviews. Lower quality evidence (such as case reports) or non-evidence (such as anecdotes or conventional wisdom) are avoided. Medical guidelines
or position statements by nationally or internationally recognized expert bodies also often contain assessments of underlying evidence.

Proctor & Gamble [8] State University of New York [9]
Canadian Association of Pharmacy in Oncology [10]
There are different ways to rank level of evidence in medicine, but they similarly put high level reviews and practice guidelines at the top.

The best evidence for treatment efficacy is mainly from

case control studies; cross-sectional studies (surveys), and other correlation studies such as ecological studies; retrospective
analyses; and non-evidence-based expert opinion or clinical experience. Case reports, whether in popular press or peer-reviewed medical journals, are anecdotal and generally fall below the minimum requirements of reliable medical sources.

Speculative proposals and early-stage research should not be cited to imply wide acceptance. For example, results of an early-stage clinical trial
would not be appropriate in the Treatment section on a disease because future treatments have little bearing on current practice. The results might – in some cases – be appropriate for inclusion in an article specifically dedicated to the treatment in question or to the researchers or businesses involved in it. Such information, particularly when citing secondary sources, may be appropriate in research sections of disease articles. To prevent misunderstanding, the text should clearly identify the level of research cited (e.g., "first-in-human safety testing").

Several formal systems exist for assessing the quality of available evidence on medical subjects.

levels of evidence
(e.g., any primary source) because of personal objections to the inclusion criteria, references, funding sources, or conclusions in the higher-level source.

Avoid over-emphasizing single studies, particularly in vitro or animal studies

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In vitro studies and animal models serve a central role in research, and are invaluable in determining mechanistic pathways and generating hypotheses. However, in vitro and animal-model findings do not translate consistently into clinical effects in human beings. Where in vitro and animal-model data are cited on Wikipedia, it should be clear to the reader that the data are pre-clinical, and the article text should avoid stating or implying that reported findings hold true in humans. The level of support for a hypothesis should be evident to a reader.

Using small-scale, single studies makes for weak evidence, and allows for

cherry picking
of data. Studies cited or mentioned in Wikipedia should be put in context by using high quality secondary sources rather than by using the primary sources.

Use up-to-date evidence

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Keeping an article up-to-date, while maintaining the more-important goal of reliability is important. These instructions are appropriate for actively researched areas with many primary sources and several reviews and may need to be relaxed in areas where little progress is being made or where few reviews are published.

  • In many topics, a review that was conducted more than five or so years ago will have been superseded by more up-to-date ones, and editors should try to find those newer sources, to determine whether the expert opinion has changed since the older sources were written. The range of reviews you examine should be wide enough to catch at least one full review cycle, containing newer reviews written and published in the light of older ones and of more-recent primary studies.
  • Assessing reviews may be difficult. While the most-recent reviews include later research results, this does not automatically give more weight to the most recent review (see recentism).
  • Prefer recent reviews to older primary sources on the same topic. If recent reviews do not mention an older primary source, the older source is dubious. Conversely, an older primary source that is seminal, replicated, and often-cited may be mentioned in the main text in a context established by reviews. E.g., the article Genetics could mention Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species as part of a discussion supported by recent reviews.

There are exceptions to these rules of thumb:

  • History sections often cite older work
  • Cochrane Library reviews are generally of high quality and are routinely maintained even if their initial publication dates fall outside the 5-year window.
  • A newer source which is of lower quality does not supersede an older source of higher quality.

Use independent sources

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Many treatments or proposed treatments lack good research into their efficacy and safety. In such cases, reliable sources may be difficult to find, while unreliable sources are readily available. When writing about medical claims not supported by mainstream research, it is vital that

notable
enough to have its own article or relevant for mention in other articles.

Choosing sources

open access journals can be useful as sources for images in Wikipedia articles. Because the above image was published under the terms of a Creative Commons license, it can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and used
on Wikipedia. Click on the above image to find its source.

A Wikipedia article should cite high-quality reliable sources

PLoS Medicine, publish only freely readable sources. Also, a few sources are in the public domain; these include many U.S. government publications, such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
.

When

WikiProject Medicine's talk page
to either provide an electronic copy or read the source and summarize what it says; if neither is possible, the editor may need to settle for using a lower-impact source.

Biomedical journals

Peer-reviewed medical journals are a natural choice as a source for up-to-date medical information in Wikipedia articles. They contain a mixture of primary and secondary sources. Journal articles come in many types, including primary

letters to the editor and other forms of commentary or correspondence, biographies, and eulogies
. It is usually best to use reviews and meta-analyses where possible. Reviews in particular give a balanced and general perspective of a topic, and are usually easier to understand.

As mentioned above, the biomedical literature contains two major types of sources: primary publications describe novel research for the first time, while review articles summarize and integrate a topic of research into an overall view. In medicine, primary sources include clinical trials, which test new treatments. Broadly speaking, reviews may be

narrative or systematic (and sometimes both). Narrative reviews often set out to provide a general summary of a topic based on a survey of the literature. Systematic reviews tend to use sophisticated methodology to address a particular clinical question in as balanced (unbiased) a way as possible. Some systematic reviews also include a statistical meta-analysis to combine the results of several clinical trials to provide stronger quantitative evidence about how well a treatment works for a particular purpose. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomized comparative (or controlled) trials can provide strong evidence of the clinical efficacy of particular treatments in given scenarios, which may in turn be incorporated into medical guidelines
or institutional position papers (ideal sources for clinical evidence). More general narrative reviews can be useful sources when outlining a topic.

Research papers that describe original experiments are primary sources. However, they normally contain introductory, background, or review sections that place their research in the context of previous work; these sections may be cited in Wikipedia with care: they are often incomplete

reproducible methodology to select primary (or sometimes secondary) studies meeting explicit criteria to address a specific question. Such reviews should be more reliable and accurate and less prone to bias than a narrative review.[13]
However, whereas a narrative review may give a panorama of current knowledge on a particular topic, a systematic review tends to have a narrower focus.

Some journals specialize in particular article types. A few, such as Evidence-based Dentistry (

ISSN 1462-0049), publish third-party summaries of reviews and guidelines published elsewhere. If an editor has access to both the original source and the summary, and finds both helpful, it is good practice to cite both sources together (see: Formatting citations for details). Others, such as Journal of Medical Biography, publish historical material that can be valuable for History sections, but is rarely useful for current medicine. Still others, such as Medical Hypotheses
, publish speculative proposals that are not reliable sources for biomedical topics.

The

British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Core basic science and biology journals include Nature, Science and Cell
.

An integral part of finding high quality sources is avoiding articles from journals without

WP:RS#Predatory journals and the #References section below for examples of such publishers.[19][20]) Other indications that a biomedical journal article may not be reliable are its publication in a journal that is not indexed in the bibliographic database MEDLINE,[21] or its content being outside the journal's normal scope (for instance, an article on the efficacy of a new cancer treatment in a psychiatric journal or the surgical techniques for hip replacement in a urology
journal). Determining the reliability of any individual journal article may also take into account whether the article has garnered significant positive citations in sources of undisputed reliability, suggesting wider acceptance in the medical literature despite any red flags suggested here.

Books

Medical textbooks published by academic publishers are often excellent secondary sources. If a textbook is intended for students, it may not be as thorough as a monograph or chapter in a textbook intended for professionals or postgraduates. Ensure that the book is up to date, unless a historical perspective is required. Doody's maintains a list of core health sciences books, which is available only to subscribers.

Springer Verlag, Wolters Kluwer, and Informa
) publish specialized medical book series with good editorial oversight; volumes in these series summarize the latest research in narrow areas, usually in a more extensive format than journal reviews. Specialized biomedical encyclopaedias published by these established publishers are often of good quality, but as a tertiary source, the information may be too terse for detailed articles.

Additionally, popular science and medicine books are useful sources, which may be primary, secondary, or tertiary, but there are exceptions. Most

self-published books or books published by vanity presses undergo no independent fact-checking or peer review and, consequently, are not reliable sources. Books published by university presses or the National Academy of Sciences
, on the other hand, tend to be well-researched and useful for most purposes.

Medical and scientific organizations

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Statements and information from reputable major medical and scientific bodies may be valuable encyclopedic sources. These bodies include the

National Academy of Sciences), the British National Health Service, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization
. The reliability of these sources ranges from formal scientific reports, which can be the equal of the best reviews published in medical journals, through public guides and service announcements, which have the advantage of being freely readable, but are generally less authoritative than the underlying medical literature.

Popular press

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The popular press is generally not a reliable source for scientific and medical information in articles. Most

generally considered independent, primary sources
.

A news article should therefore not be used as a sole source for a medical fact or figure. Editors are encouraged to seek out the scholarly research behind the news story. One possibility is to cite a higher-quality source along with a more-accessible popular source, for example, with the |laysummary= parameter of {{cite journal}}.

Conversely, the high-quality popular press can be a good source for social, biographical, current-affairs, financial, and historical information in a medical article. For example, popular science magazines such as

Health News Review,[1] and Media Doctor, along with specialized academic journals, such as the Journal of Health Communication; reviews can also appear in the American Journal of Public Health, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Bad Science column in The Guardian, and others. Health News Review's criteria for rating news stories[27]
can help to get a general idea of the quality of a medical news article.

Other sources

Reliable sources must be strong enough to support the claim. A lightweight source may sometimes be acceptable for a lightweight claim, but never for an extraordinary claim.

Press releases, newsletters, advocacy and self-help publications, blogs and other websites, and other sources contain a wide range of biomedical information ranging from factual to fraudulent, with a high percentage being of low quality. Conference abstracts present incomplete and unpublished data and undergo varying levels of review; they are often unreviewed and their initial conclusions may have changed dramatically if and when the data are finally ready for publication.

surprising claims, and carefully identified in the text as preliminary work. Peer-reviewed medical information resources such as WebMD, UpToDate, and eMedicine
are usually acceptable sources for uncontroversial information; however, as much as possible Wikipedia articles should cite the more established literature directly.

Searching for sources

Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Resources

Search engines are commonly used to find biomedical sources. Each engine has quirks, advantages, and disadvantages, and may not return the results that the editor needs unless used carefully. It typically takes experience and practice to recognize when a search has not been effective; even if an editor finds useful sources, they may have missed other sources that would have been more useful or they may generate pages and pages of less-than-useful material. A good strategy for avoiding sole reliance on search engines is to find a few recent high-quality sources and follow their citations to see what the search engine missed. It can also be helpful to perform a plain web search rather than one of scholarly articles only.

meta-analyses, to freely readable sources, and/or "core clinical journals". Although PubMed is a comprehensive database, many of its indexed journals restrict online access. Another website, PubMed Central, provides free access to full texts. While it is often not the official published version, it is a peer-reviewed manuscript that is substantially the same, but lacks minor copy-editing by the publisher.[30]

When looking at an individual abstract on the PubMed website, an editor can click on "Publication Types, MeSH Terms" at the bottom of the page to see how PubMed has classified a document. For example, a page that is tagged as "Comment" or "Letter" is a non-peer-reviewed letter to the editor. The classification scheme includes about 70 types of documents.[2] For medical information, the most useful types of articles are typically labeled "Guideline", "Meta-analysis", "Practice guideline", or "Review".

See also

Templates

References

  1. PMID 22412087
    .
  2. ^ Naik, Gutnam (December 2, 2011). "Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results". Wall Street Journal.
  3. ^ Nature's Challenges in Reproducibility initiative
  4. ^ Prinz F et al. Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets? Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 10, 712 (September 2011) | doi:10.1038/nrd3439-c1
  5. ^ C. Glenn Begley & Lee M. Ellis Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research Nature 483, 531–533 (29 March 2012) doi:10.1038/483531a
  6. ^ Editors of Nature. April 24 2013 Announcement: Reducing our irreproducibility
  7. PMID 17473152
    .
  8. ^ "Evidence-Based Decision Making: Introduction and Formulating Good Clinical Questions | Continuing Education Course | dentalcare.com Course Pages | DentalCare.com". www.dentalcare.com. Retrieved 2015-09-03.
  9. ^ "SUNY Downstate EBM Tutorial". library.downstate.edu. Retrieved 2015-09-03.
  10. ^ "The Journey of Research - Levels of Evidence | CAPhO". www.capho.org. Retrieved 2015-09-03.
  11. ISBN 0-443-07444-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  12. ISBN 0-443-07444-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  13. ^
    PMID 9310574
    .
  14. PMID 19153565
    .
  15. PMID 21200038
    .
  16. ^ "Abridged Index Medicus (AIM or "Core Clinical") Journal Titles". NLM. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  17. ^ a b "PubMed tutorial: filters". NLM. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  18. ^ Hill DR, Stickell H, Crow SJ (2003). "Brandon/Hill selected list of print books for the small medical library" (PDF). Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Archived from the original on June 15, 2011. Retrieved 2008-09-16.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  19. ^ Beall, Jeffrey (25 February 2015). "Predatory open access journals in a performance-based funding model: Common journals in Beall's list and in version V of the VABB-SHW" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. ^ Beall, Jeffrey. "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". Retrieved 23 July 2013.
  21. ^ To determine if a journal is MEDLINE indexed, go to this website, and search for the name of the journal. On the journal page, under the heading "Current Indexing Status", you can see whether or not the journal is currently indexed. Note that journals that have changed names or ceased publication will not be "currently" indexed on MEDLINE, but their indexing status, when they were being published, can be viewed under other headings on that same page.
  22. PMID 16404471
    .
  23. PMID 23832153. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |lay-source= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-url= ignored (help
    )
  24. PMID 18507496. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |lay-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-source= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-url= ignored (help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link
    )
  25. PMID 19118299
    .
  26. PMID 19414840.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  27. ^ "How we rate stories". Health News Review. 2008. Archived from the original on 2012-07-23. Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  28. PMID 15857882.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link
    )
  29. PMID 9251552
    .
  30. doi:10.1087/095315107X204012. Retrieved 2008-10-24.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )

Further reading
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