User:Mathglot/sandbox/Drafts/Using medical database collections

Wikipedia includes many pages containing biomedical content. Information about identifying reliable sources for such content can be found at Identifying reliable sources (medicine). This page provides some methods and resources for using medical database collections in order to find and evaluate reliable sources for biomedical information.

Background
The Wikipedia guideline on Identifying reliable sources on bio medical content supports the general sourcing policy with specific attention to what is appropriate for medical content in any Wikipedia article. This

Ideal sources for biomedical information include: review articles (especially systematic reviews) published in reputable medical journals; academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant fields and from respected publishers; and guidelines or position statements from national or international expert bodies. Primary sources should generally not be used for medical content – as such sources often include unreliable or preliminary information, for example early lab results which don't hold in later clinical trials.

Besides general search engines like Google and Bing, there are many specialized search engines available which have searchable collections of scholarly journals or other content. Google scholar is perhaps the best known of these, but there are many others, and some may be suitable for searching for reliable sources for biomedical content. However like Google, all search engines return algorithmic results based on published documents, and they are not curated for adherence to Wikipedia's guidelines on biomedical content. Individual collections have their strong and weak points, and indiviual documents returned by search need to be vetted like any other source for compliance.

Searchable collections with biomedical content
This section lists database collections which may contain reliable sources for certain queries. They are all searchable, and each has their own algorithm for returning results deemed most relevant for the user query. Most will return a mix of results from primary and other sources; as noted above, primary sources are generally not usable for verifying biomedical content. The fact that a collection is included below is not an endorsement, and not every search result for even the best collections is usable; in each case, a resource returned by a search should be evaluated against the criteria of the reliable sources for biomedical content.

Evaluating and comparing collections
This section contains tips and advice on how to decide which database collections are likely to have the best results for the article or topic you are researching.

Evaluating sources from search results
This section explains how to evaluate sources returned in the search results for a given collection to identify if it is WP:MEDRS-compliant.