Wikipedia:Peer review/Excitatory synapse/archive1

Excitatory synapse
This peer review discussion has been closed. I think this article had all the necessary information in a nutshell. However, I think it would be better to have more details on all of subheadings. For instance, more of biochemistry and mechanisms involved in the chemical synaptic transmission would better elucidate the article overall. You can mention where electrical synapses are mainly found within our nervous system (to add to the chemical vs electrical synapses heading). You also mentioned that the first electrical synapse was discovered in crayfish and maybe you can add a research section describing the finding and discuss current ongoing related research. Also, I think you can add more links to your article to better accommodate the viewer. (e.g. NMDA receptor, AMPA receptor, G-protein coupled receptor, hypothalmus, etc.) Thanks, Young B. (talk).

Ruhrfisch comments: This is an interesting article, but I wonder how this kind of synapse differs from a regular synapse. There used to be a separate article on inhibitory synapse, but that is now a redirect to Inhibitory postsynaptic potential. Since there is also an article on Excitatory postsynaptic potential, would it make sense for this to merged there too? Or to the regular synapse article? Thanks for your work on it and here are some suggestions for improvement.
 * The lead needs to follow WP:LEAD better and provide an accessible overview of the whole article. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself. As it is though, the "influx of positively charged sodium (Na+) ions" is only ion the lead.
 * My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way, but several sections and subsections are not in the lead that I can see - Diseases and most of the neurotransmitters are not explicitly in the lead.
 * Wikilinks are generally at first occurence of a word in the lead - so move the neuron link earlier.
 * Also make sure that abbreviations and names follow the name used in the main article(s) here on Wikipedia so they are consistent. So This phenomenon is known as an excitatory potential (EPSP). should be This phenomenon is known as an excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSP).
 * The tag at the top of article says the article needs more references. By the way, such a lack of references tag is enough to disqualify this from PR. There is one "citation needed" tag.
 * My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref. See WP:CITE and WP:V
 * Although this seems to have lots of refs, the one I checked does not back up most of the information in the sentences it is used for. The sentences are Like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease lacks a cure. Therefore, in addition to lifestyle changes and surgery, the goal of pharmaceutical drugs used in the treatment of PD patients is to control symptoms and limit, when possible, the progression of the disease. Levodopa (L-DOPA), the most widely used treatment of PD, is converted to dopamine in the body and helps to relieve the effect of decreased dopaminergic neurons in the central nervous system. Other dopamine agonists have been administered to patients in an effort to mimic dopamine’s affect at excitatory synapses, binding its receptors and causing the desired postsynaptic response.[11] and current ref 11 is to a PubMed Health page on Parkinson's Disease. However this page does not even mention synapses or synaptic response or receptors or the word excitatory.
 * The refs used in the article need more information - for example current ref 11 needs a publisher and access date. In general, internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. cite web and other cite templates may be helpful.
 * The toolbox in the upper right corner of this PR page shows two dead external links that need to be fixed.
 * I would probably include some more background information on neurons, how they function, and how they form circuits. This would help to provide context to the reader - see WP:PCR
 * Article is pretty short, so not much else to say - try to find other articles to link it to in order to get rid of the Orphan tag.
 * Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in all peer reviews, in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch &gt;&lt;&gt; &deg; &deg; 21:11, 23 April 2011 (UTC)