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The popular press is generally not a reliable source for scientific and medical information in articles. Most medical news articles fail to discuss important issues such as evidence quality, [27] costs, and risks versus benefits, [28] and news articles too often convey wrong or misleading information about health care. [29]
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.
A 2014 study of 259 health professionals in Spain found that while 53% of them used the Spanish Wikipedia to look up medical information during work, only 3% of them considered it reliable and only 16% recommended it to their patients. Only 16% had ever edited a Wikipedia article; the most common reasons for not doing were that they did not ...
"Wikipedia's articles are not intended to provide medical advice, but are important and widely used as a source of health information.[1] Therefore, it is vital that any biomedical information in articles be based on reliable, third-party, published secondary sources and accurately reflect current knowledge."
Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Identifying reliable sources (medicine). PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review ...
Quality of health information on the internet becomes important in this context as both misdiagnosis and inaccurate recommendations for triage are possible. Additionally, most online diagnostic tools fail to account for the user's familial and personal medical history, including current diagnoses and conditions they possess.
A reliable source is one that presents a well-reasoned theory or argument supported by strong evidence. Reliable sources include scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books written by researchers for students and researchers, which can be found in academic databases and search engines like JSTOR and Google Scholar .
Consequently, some judgment and comparison of sources is needed in order to identify reliable sources. Reliable sources respect truth; a source that is commonly untruthful is not reliable. A source may be partly or more or less reliable. Concurrence of possibly reliable sources may help in identifying reliable sources, and editors should seek it.