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Hello, Alexuang, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:56, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
Hi! I saw that you used some studies in the Kwashiorkor article. This poses a bit of an issue since they weren't accompanied by secondary sources that backs up the claims.
The issue with studies is that they're primary sources for the data compiled by its creators, who are also typically the ones who conducted the research. The publisher can't serve as a verification of the study, as they only review to ensure that there are no obvious errors that would invalidate the study and determine if the study is something that should be published. They don't provide any commentary, which a secondary source would. Studies are also fairly limited out of necessity, as there's almost always not possible to survey every person that could fall into the study area. As such, the findings are seen as only really true for those persons who participated. The results could differ if they were to survey people from a different area, with a different ailment than cancer, or from different backgrounds or income levels. The secondary source will help provide that context. You could also have someone ask why one study was chosen over another that may give different results or one that isn't in English. That said, it is generally OK to use the literature reviews in a study as long as you're careful to avoid the parts where the author uses them to discuss their study.
Essentially what you need to do here is to add secondary sources to the article. This is all especially important when it comes to discussing health related data and claims. The policy page on the guidelines for sourcing medical articles goes over this in a bit more depth.
I hope this helps! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:19, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
Hi Shalor,
I briefly reviewed my citations and the most problematic ones I identified were the Malawian twin study (Smith et al 2013) and the Pham et al 2019 paper. These are both already supported by the paper by Briend (2014) which, in my reading, is a reliable secondary source. I have also just added in another review article on the gut microbiome by Velly et al (2017) that touches on the 2013 Smith et al paper in the broader context of our current understanding of microbiome changes and dysbiosis.
Can you clarify what you mean by, "That said, it is generally OK to use the literature reviews in a study as long as you're careful to avoid the parts where the author uses them to discuss their study."? I'm not sure I understand this sentence.
On a related note, I understand that we should not rely on primary sources for wiki health articles but I'm not sure where the distinction lies between being able to properly cite/draw information from a review article discussing the primary literature vs. not being able to directly cite from a primary source. Since review articles commonly paraphrase the primary literature they are reviewing, are we only allowed to draw from the commentary/conclusions of the reviewer? If I were to utilize a primary source alone as a reference for a certain statement (which I understand I should not do), does the nature/context of that statement matter? I can understand why it would not be a good idea to present information as a claim if it is the conclusion of a research study, but what if information is simply being stated in a more neutral manner?
For example, for the kwashiorkor article I wrote "Several hypotheses have been proposed that are associated with and explain some, but not all aspects of the pathophysiology of kwashiorkor. They include, but are not limited to protein deficiency causing hypoalbuminemia, amino acid deficiency, oxidative stress, and gut microbiome changes." To me, this is a neutral statement that is different from, say, a hypothetical claim that "a 2013 study in elderly males showed that eating fish twice a day lowers the rate of heart attack by 23%". I can understand why having a health claim on a health article based solely on one primary source would be a bad idea, but does this same standard apply to more 'matter-of-fact' information that does not make the same kind of health claim?
Thanks for any insight you can provide.
Cheers, --Alexuang (talk) 23:38, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
:-)
WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 15 August 2019 (UTC)