Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)

See also: Wikipedia:Reliable sources.

In general, Wikipedia articles should rely on reliable secondary sources. Good secondary sources are, for example, medicine textbooks.

If the latest research findings arrived in your post-box today, great! But as you add them to an article make sure they are supported by background content. You might also want to consider waiting until other researchers have confirmed it, or it is integrated in review articles or medical books. If desired, you can broadly signify a trend without endeavouring to keep the reference list completely up-to-date with the very latest studies.

Ideally every medical article should have

• a few historical references (e.g. first reported case, discovery of pathogenesis)
• one or two recent systematic reviews in core journals (like Nature, Science, Cell,...).
• Textbooks are important as secondary sources.
• Some databases (like OMIM or eMedicine) provide in-depth peer-reviewed information (but remember, nobody's perfect).

Ideally any online reference will be to an open sites that do not restrict access to non-professionals or require a subscription. Template:PMC (see below) may be very helpful to this end.

• References - are sources used as background to a whole topic and should be included as a bulleted list (start each line with an asterisk '*'). Citation details may be manually formatted, but the use of generic citation templates helps standardise their appearance.
• Footnotes - are sources provided to expand or verify specific details in the text. The same manual or template formating of citation details is used, but additional markup is needed to generate the footnote numbered links (e.g. ^[1]). WP:Footnotes describes cite.php, the latest of several methods, as summarised below.

• OMIM provides a lot of useful info with regards to genetic diseases.
• MedlinePlus has encyclopedic content in plain English from the NIH.
• eMedicine is a very big and reliable source.
• Diseases Database.
• WhoNamedIt is an excellent reference for eponyms in medicine.
• GPnotebook is a UK website which provides an easy access for general practitioners and may be an interesting source.
• SUNY Downstate Medical Center has an excellent set of online anatomic preparations.
• National Organisation of Rare Disorders
• Merck Manuals
• The Virtual Hospital
• Ganfyd.org : ganfyd is a UK project, using mediawiki and restricted to qualified people (as a reaction to medical articles in wikipedia that can be edited by anyone). They have some 1600 medical articles.