Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fasoracetam


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Consensus is that this chemical substance is sufficiently notable qua substance. Whether any content should be (re-)added concerning medical applications, etc, is an editorial matter subject to the relevant content policies.  Sandstein  11:39, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Fasoracetam

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

There is a wave of interest in so-called nootropic molecules that people buy on the internet and consume (!). For this molecule, there are no secondary sources - see this pubmed search -  so all we have are primary sources from the biomedical literature. These sources are notoriously unreliable and we cannot have an entire article based on them - our mission is to provide the public with accepted knowledge per WP:NOT. So this fails WP:NOTABILITY as there are insufficient reliable sources for us to be able to say anything meaningful about this compound. Jytdog (talk) 23:37, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment: Only three refs, all from 1997–1999. It was "originally developed by the Japanese pharmaceutical company Nippon Shinyaku to treat Alzheimer's disease but, after being put through clinical trials, was shelved for efficacy reasons", and as of 2012 was being researched by a Dr. Hakon Hakonarson of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for use with ADHD . Has there been no solid information/data/research since then? If not, I would lean delete, agreeing with the nominator that Wikipedia needs to provide accepted knowledge. Softlavender (talk) 00:31, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I am not seeing much. Even google books barely mentions it  Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 00:48, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  SwisterTwister   talk  01:09, 12 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete - notability.  Seppi  333  (Insert 2¢) 01:12, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep, in fact, an  Unquestionable keep. There is a difference between chemistry and medicine.  google books is not the place to look for chemistry,  but Google Scholar, where there are multiple papers. For chemistry, MEDRS is quite irrelevant, except for actual therapeutic claims. We have usually not made WP articles on chemicals where there is only one scientific paper, but herethere are more: Tetrahedron Letters, traditionally the most important single journal in synthetic organic chemistry;     Crystal Growth & Purification  from the American Chemical Society; Il Farmaco,  ; Journal of Thoracic Oncology ;  Current Pharmaceutical Design,  ; discussions in terms of comparison with similar drugs in    Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology ; Medicinal chemistry /reviews , and about 20 other articles and at least 50 patents. -- I'm only thru half the google scholar search results and I haven't even checked for papers cited them. (Yes, I have looked at each of the papers or at least the abstracts, though I have not read any of them thoroughly). Jytdog is correct that there is also a good deal of speculative literature on possible applications, but when he and DocJames want to not cover it for that reason they're confusing medicine with the totality of science. And even in medicine  Jytog is also wrong that we cover only "accepted" medicine--what is correct is that we write our articles from the standpoint of accepted medicine, but we cover everything that is significantly discussed, even by nonscientists, even by the ignorant.  Saying otherwise is a total misconception of the principles of the pseudoscience guidelines.  DGG ( talk ) 01:25, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * well hm. You seem to have misread me.  Which is surprising.  I am not talking about FRINGE.  I am talking about accepted knowledge in science.  There is a real problem with reproducibility in the primary scientific literature, especially in the biomedical arena.  I hope you are not contesting that.   Many of the papers you cite there are chemical; a few of them are biomedical.  With a drug candidate, the biomedical results are the "so what" that makes something notable or not.  I don't mess around much with pure chemical content.  I know there is value there.  If there is something really notable chemically about Fasoracetam  - some reaction that was really freaking hard that somebody figured out, then fine - let there be an article about it on that basis.  But the current article is based on its putative biological effects, and while there are indeed several primary sources about that, there are no reviews that are included in the pubmed index.  That leaves us with two issues.  First, we just have a bunch of primary sources that are thin reeds on which to hang a presumption of "accepted knowledge".  Secondly and most importantly,  nobody in the relevant biomedical field (not neuroscience, not neurology, not even medicinal chemistry) has found it important enough to write a review on it that was published in a journal good enough/relevant enough to be pubmed indexed.  So we don't have a guide to which of the primary sources should be depended on, and which turned out to be dead ends or irreproducible.  You know as well as I do that many "dud" papers are never retracted; they are just ignored by the field.   So this is a pure notability argument -  this substance fails NOTABILITY with regard to its being a candidate drug; we don't have sufficient reliable sources with which to build an article.  Does that make more sense? Jytdog (talk) 03:11, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * To be sure some some papers have been retracted so in some sense all   are dubious, but this applies just as much to systematic reviews, which have had a disconcerting habit of contradicting each other. But what are the odds that an article published  in Tetrahedron letters is fake?   If the article were saying that this is a cure for whatever, your criticisms would be correct. But the chemical has been discussed in multiple sources that meet the criterion for Reliable sources in organic  chemistry, and that's the GNG. Articles dealing with medicinal chemistry to not have to meet MEDRS unless they make therapeutic claims, in which case that art of the article needs to be removed.    Frankly, MEDRS is an unfortunately  necessary compromise specialism of WP:RS to sort out confusion--it would really be much more in keeping with the principle of NPOV if we didn't need it, but we arguably do because of the widespread public illiteracy in that field combined with the widespread commercial quackery.  It has its use, and don't dilute it by trying to use it for everything that might be potentially applicable. We have enough problems keeping the medical articles clean. And do you really think we are doing the public a service by rejecting all information on candidate medicines, which by definition are not yet accepted.  DGG ( talk ) 04:39, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Wow you are talking right past me/around me. This is not an article about a chemical, qua chemical.  It is an article about a drug candidate which means its biological activity is essential.  You are just going right around that... and I very strongly disagree with how you are describing MEDRS.  MEDRS is 100% in line with OR, VERIFY, NPOV, and RS in calling strongly for us to use secondary sources and to use primary sources only with caution.  WP:MED is not any kind of walled garden, and I am not applying MEDRS in some weird way. The point here is I don't see an article is valid that is only built on primary sources, especially not biomedical ones.   If there no or almost no reviews on this chemical, it fails NOTABILITY.  We don't synthesize the primary literature in WP - we summarize accepted knowledge... Jytdog (talk) 08:48, 12 March 2016 (UTC)


 * By the way, just for the sake of article history and references (some of which I referred to in my Comment above), this is the article before the date it was AfDed: . It has been trimmed per various wiki rationales. Softlavender (talk) 02:29, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep The nomination seems to be based upon WP:NOTEVERYTHING.  That is supported by an arbcom statement of principle that "An encyclopedia article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject, not a complete exposition of all possible details."  That doesn't seem to be a reason to delete an entire page; instead it's just an endorsement of our summary style. This chemical clearly exists and it doesn't seem difficult to find review-class sources of reasonable quality which say things like "some new drugs such as nefiracetam and fasoracetam appear promising."  This is one of a family of such drugs and the family is covered in sources such as Design and Study of Piracetam-like Nootropics, Controversial Members of the Problematic Class of Cognition-Enhancing Drugs.  The worst case would therefore be to merge into some wider article about the family such as racetam.  It is our editing policy to retain such content in a constructive way rather than deleting it. Andrew D. (talk) 05:51, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep as I noticed this certainly seemed notable and acceptable enough. Improvements are certainly encouraged. SwisterTwister   talk  06:27, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * delete PubMed search does not show much for secondary sources--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:53, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep Per DGG. The Master ---)Vote Saxon(--- 04:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep or Move to Draft namespace. I can see why some want this removed, if it ends up being removed I guess several other piracetam derivatives should have their pages investigated for removal as well. Either way, moving to the Draft namespace would be preferable to deletion. Erik.Bjareholt (talk) 15:55, 14 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.