User:NeuroBlast100/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Neuroscience

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this particular article since neuroscience is my major. Having more than a preliminary understanding about the topic will help me better evaluate the article from objective point of view. I first impression of the article was that it was definitely well written and seemed to cover all major bases related to the topic. Proper and credible source and citations were consistently used throughout the article.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of the article appropriately summarized the topic. The language used was easy to understand and free of jargon. It briefly mentioned several sub-fields and phenomena relevant to the main topic. That being said, the lead section itself was not very well written. It was not concise but rather overly dense. It was a mere 5 sentences drafted out into two paragraphs that did not completely capture the essence and significance of neuroscience as a discipline. There was no mention or summary of the sections to follow, leaving a reader confused and unaware of what to expect or to understand whether or not the article is an appropriate fit for their needs or purposes.

The content of the article is relevant and well written and uses an appropriate language and grammar for the most part. There were a few spelling errors in some sections (Chemistry of Memory Storage) and the article failed to maintain a neutral tone, in my opinion. Analyzing the article as a whole, one notices a constant theme: applications and advances in engineering and technology. The subsection titled "Computational neuroscience" is almost entirely dedicated to nanoparticle technology, barley touching on its significance as a therapeutic agent, while actual facts related to computational neuroscience are nowhere to be found. The same theme makes a reappearance several time and noticeably towards the end of the article in a section titled "Engineering applications of neuroscience," which even though is an up-and-coming field, does little to reflect current and more popular trends. A separate section titled "Applications of Neuroscience" with several sub-sections focusing on topics such as such as medical, pharmacological, neuropsychiatric, clinical, and pre-clinical research applications etc. would have been more effective in conveying the multitude of real-world applications of neuroscience.

The layout of the article is very ambiguous. Sections and sub-sections seem to be randomly placed with no thought about their relatedness to one another. For instance, under the section titled "Chemistry of Memory Storage," a topic which in itself is extremely complicated and belongs nowhere in this article, we have several sub-sections titled Cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, Computational neuroscience, and Neuroscience and medicine. None of these topics are related to the parent section and can thus confuse someone with no prior knowledge of the topic.

The article starts off strong, covering all bases to aid the reader's understanding of neuroscience as an interdisciplinary science, but gets lost somewhere along the way. The History section effectively and chronologically summarizes the contributions of various prominent scientists in the discovery and development of neuroscience as a discipline over the years. It makes excellent use of examples and historical anecdotes, most of which can be traced back to credible sources. Unfortunately, this section fails to acknowledge the many contributions of various female neuroscientists towards the growth and expansion of the field. Even though the article sheds light on several female Noble laureates towards the end of the article, it does not make up for the fact that their contributions weren't explicitly mentioned similar to their male counterparts.

Even though the article uses well over 100 citations from different sources, some citations were outdated and led to archived pages. Despite the variety of sources referenced, it was easy to each clusters in-text citations from a single source in a few areas, e.g. the section "Computational neuroscience" drew heavily and almost exclusively from a single source, [75]. Further, many references were outdated and archived. Their respective links did not lead to an active webpage with any information to back up the claims that were made using said sources as references, for example [26], [32], [33] among others. Further, there were many sections throughout the article that were not attributed to a proper source or reference. Additionally, the article was difficult to follow in some places, such as in the section "Modern Neuroscience" there is a very descriptive sentence outlining the different parts of a neuron, which can easily confuse a reader's visualization of the cell since there isn't a labeled diagram/figure to complement the description.

Despite its many drawbacks, the article did convey some information in an engaging way. The table outlining the Major Branches of neuroscience was very informative and well organized. It shed light on almost every field of neuroscience that exists today in an accurate and concise manner using credible sources. Further, the only other table listing various the Noble laureates who have been recognized for furthering the field of neuroscience also provided a clear and visual depiction of the various trends in neuroscience research over the years.

The talk page of this article showed that the article had been peer reviewed in December 2022, and no significant changes have ben made since then. The archives of the talk page, however, seemed to have been brimming with discussion about fruitful ways to improve the article. There was significant discussion about many of the caveats mentioned above such as the lack of proper citations, the need for a more appropriate layout and sectioning. There is a very interesting discussion on Neuroscience and Neurobiology and their place in biology and psychology and the need to include the proper characterization of neuroscience as an independent or related field. This was a theme that I missed in the original published draft of the article. There are many misconceptions about the belonging of neuroscience in its various contributory disciplines and it would be helpful to include a section in the main article describing exactly that. Essentially, it would be prudent to include a section clearly distinguishing and demarcating the boundaries between neuroscience and related fields like psychology or biology and even neurology.

To summarize, even though the article itself is full of information, not all of belongs in this particular context. The article could be significantly improved by restructuring it, adding new sections such as on the difference between neuroscience and related disciplines such as psychology or neurology, a discussion about the various imaging and research techniques used, brief overview of the parts of the nervous system that are majorly studied, a more representative range of real world applications, more images to better aid the understanding of certain topics, crediting female scientists for their breakthrough discoveries and work in the fields and including updated citations and references and fixing grammatical errors.