User:Ataylor11/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cardiovascular disease

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
When looking up the leading cause of death is the world, it is said to be cardiovascular disease. Since I am Pre-Medicine and plan on becoming a physician, I thought I could do this assignment over an important illness so that I can learn something in the process. It is also relevant to our class since it discusses medicine.

Evaluate the article
The lead section has a good first sentence that includes a brief description of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and the section provides a lot of general information that is important to know about CVD. There is no mention of the rest of the article and what it includes and there is no description of what is not included in the article. The lead section is very concise and lists a lot of diseases that are considered cardiovascular disease, which is a lot so there are two very long sentences including all of the different types and the things that may lead to CVD.

The article content is relevant to the article subject and the content is mostly up to date. Some dates for information are a little outdated (2015). The topics within the article seem equally distributed with information and all of the information you would expect to find on the subject is included. The article does mention socioeconomic disadvantage as a risk factor which is a historically underrepresented population.

Since this article is only discussing the facts of CVD it seems very neutral and only gives you facts that are supported by sources. The author does make one conclusion regarding the socioeconomic disadvantage by saying that low-income households are affected by CVD more than high- income countries. Which this could very well be true but then they mention that there are low numbers of information regarding the affects in low-income households. This is understandable given that many studies are not conducted within low-income countries since the people that give funding to these studies or the ones that support them generally are from the higher-income countries. One thing that really sticks out and is not like the rest of the article is the sub-heading titled "Air pollution." In this subsection, the author discusses air pollution and how it can lead to CVD. The odd part of this section is the mention of specific numbers regarding the size of airborne particles and the amount of time of exposure and the specific numbers of how blood pressure changes with exposure. There are no "positions" that can be taken with this article and therefore, there are no indications of the author trying to sway a reader one way or the other.

Each detail or fact in the article is cited with a source. Each source looks like it is from a scholarly article that is written by people who have been peer reviewed. The articles do seem like they are current. There are a few that are from 2003 and 2004 but the majority of the articles are from 2013-2018. Just aout every source has a different author and they are from a wide variety of scholarly texts. Since these are peer-reviewed articles, I would say that there are no better sources for this article. Since it is related to science and health, scholarly, peer-reviewed articles would be preferred for research. After checking a few links, they all worked when clicked.

This article is well written and laid out in a very clear fashion and it would be easy to find the specific information you are looking for without having to read the entire article. I also do not recall running into any grammatical or spelling errors while reading through the article. It seems as if this article was edited and updated throughout a long span of time.

The article does not contain very many images but this would be expected. They include references to the other diseases within CVD and these each show a picture of what the disease may cause in regards to an artery or valve. Within this article, the images included are a real heart, a chart to depict where CVD is more common throughout the world in 2004 and 2012, microscopic image of the calcification of the cardiovascular system, and a Micrograph of a heart with fibrosis (yellow) and amyloidosis (brown). These are all good images to include with this subject and the only other images I would include would be an anatomical model of the heart and maybe some more charts of information regarding the risk and percentage of people with CVD. Unfortunately, not every image is cited with a source. You could say that the images are laid out in a visually appearing way, they are just next to the texts that are relevant to the image.

There is only one comment in the Talk page that discusses a grammatical error within the article and how the author should fix it. The article is under the subject of health and medicine, and biology and is included in the WikiProject titled "Medicine."

The article, overall, is very good, it provides a lot of detailed information and is presented in a clear and easy way. Unlike most medical articles, such as ones that are in scholarly texts, it is an easy read and when a word would probably not be understood, the author provides links to other wikipedia sites that go into detail about what that word means. The article contains everything that I would expect it to and it has a lot of sources listed which tells me that it is well researched and provides accurate information. A lot of the time, teachers say not to use wikipedia as a source but based on this article and it's sources, I would be comfortable using it as a source on a school paper.