Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of important publications in medicine

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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. While this has not been closed in over a week, I don't think any further discussion will change the rough consensus given. –MuZemike 06:00, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of important publications in medicine

List of important publications in medicine (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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cf: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of important publications in sociology and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of important publications in biology; search revealed no compilation of important works in this field Curb Chain (talk) 13:37, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Related AfDs (four previous, six current):
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:44, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. — • Gene93k (talk) 18:50, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. This is one kind of the lists a curious reader of an encyclopedia would be interested in in furthering his understanding and knowledge on a particular subject. That we don't have another source (or more) giving exactly the same list that we are going to compile is not only a reason of avoiding copyright infringement but also the intricate matter of compiling survey texts: as long as material is notable it should be mentioned, under consideration of adhering to a NPOV. What this article needs is nothing but a precise inclusion criterion and reliable secondary sources for each entry stating its particularly notability. Cleanup is also no criterion for deletion. Nageh (talk) 10:42, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]


And the argument seems to be the same everywhere, that being the word "important" being used. Dream Focus 09:56, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per no original research or merge/move to something like List of publications in medicine by impact factorDoc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:07, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The topic of the article is certainly encyclopedia-worthy (although the word "important" does not seem to do the topic justice: perhaps "landmark" is better). For instance, I don't think there can be any serious argument that De materia medica or the writings of Hypocrates are not "landmark" publications. The general arguments (WP:V/WP:OR) above are not compelling. The question is, can a list on this topic in principle be referenced in a way that meets our core principles? A quick Google search for "Landmark publications in medicine" turns up many promising sources on which to base an article (e.g., "Science and Technology in Medicine: An Illustrated Account Based on Ninety-Nine Landmark Publications from Five Centuries"). As for the subjectivity of the inclusion criteria, we have plenty of subjective articles without a problem: we just WP:ASF and use sources. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:29, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This is running into WP:N territory. Are you saying that if someone comments and the positivity or greatness of a publication, it will be a citation and the paper can be included? At Micheal Jackson's funeral, many notables commented on him. Do all these comments come up on article?Curb Chain (talk) 18:26, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's a straw man. I'm not talking about using the opinions of some random bloke on the street here, but serious scholarly sources. You know, like the kind of sources used to write an encyclopedia? Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:34, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The nominator's (implicit) rationale for deletion – no sources exist that define which publications are "important" and which are not – is unreasonable. What it boils down to is: "There is no reliable source proclaiming, The following are the important publications in [insert name of scientific field]: 1. ... 2. ... 3. ...; therefore it is original research and must be deleted." (And if such a source existed, the article would instead be speedily deleted as a copyvio – you can't win.) This is not a reasonable deletion rationale because it applies to basically any "List of ..." article. For example, for List of magazines in Pakistan, where is the reliable source that states: The following are the notable magazines in Pakistan: ...? A rationale that applies to essentially all stand-alone list articles is obviously too broad; if you wish to see this list deleted, a rationale must be presented that is somewhat specific to this list, and not so general that it applies generically to all list articles.  --Lambiam 14:33, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The article should cite authoritative published sources saying the listed works are important in the field. But it is enough to have one or more authoritative published sources FOR EACH LISTED ITEM SEPARATELY. It is unreasonable to require a SINGLE source that gives the whole list. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:20, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I personally would even be happy with a Cite that lists 50% of the entries on the List, but the problem is, none have been presented or discovered during these AfD's. Editors are assuming that the entries are obvious & common knowledge, but saying "English Text X" is important, probably does not hold water in China, where "Chinese Text Y" is important. Is 1 more important than the other? Is neither important in Latvian? What is "important" to each person will be different based upon their own experience. Exit2DOS • Ctrl • Alt • Del 22:36, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Reasons for inclusion are clearly presented at the top of the list article. If you have a doubt about any item listed, discuss it on the talk page. There are reliable sources already found to prove this is notable. No sense repeating everything said in the many places this same debate is going on at. Dream Focus 23:27, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, may main argument is here. --Pgallert (talk) 07:04, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Two reasons. Firstly the term "important" cannot be objectively determined. We don't have a "list of beautiful people". I've read Geometry guy's comments and don't buy his argument in this regard. We can find reliable sources that say someone is beautiful. The key is that the "important" is explicit rather than implicit and the scope is way too large. One could produce a Timeline of cardiology that included key findings over the years. Or a History of evidence-based-medicine that discussed the landmark studies. For those it is reasonable to cite our reliable sources and use them per WP:WEIGHT to determine inclusion. One might even, for a narrow scope, find a publication that provides the list entries in one go. The second reason is that the items in this list aren't homogeneous. The first section contains historical texts that collect medicial wisdom of the age or author. The later section contains the publication of landmark studies. It is actually the studies that are the notable fact. Nobody cares much about the study text or the publication they were within. So is this a collection of great medical texts or a collection of groundbreaking medical research studies? For our purposes, the word "publications" isn't helpful then. We're left with "List of ... medical ..." There are better ways to list this sort of information. Let's delete this one as unhelpful. Colin°Talk 08:12, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for reading my comments: no purchase is required, but donations are welcome :). They were intended to show that the "cannot be objectively determined" argument is not automatically grounds for deletion, but also that reliable sources are needed both to support the inclusion criterion of the list and to support the inclusion of individual entries. There is quite a range between "beautiful people" and "landmark court decisions" or "major biblical figures", and intelligent discussion is needed to determine what is encyclopedic (beneficial, useful) and what isn't in any particular case. I've only looked into the details in the case of mathematics, hence my "weak" keep here. I hope other editors will welcome your thoughtful remarks and suggestions for alternative ways to approach this issue. Geometry guy 22:43, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Given that this deletion discussion is unlikely to go towards delete, a more productive approach is probably to consider the better ways of collating this information as a list or lists. Then, perhaps, these lists would be deleted as superseded. I suspect that "important" is already frowned upon by list guidelines, or at least should be. And the idea of collating all "publications" is perhaps not wise, if one uses the term to mean anything that has been published ever. Perhaps, in mathematics, the published academic paper really is a key document that first explained some new way of thinking. I don't think, for medicine, the modern academic paper itself is worth much -- it is the great study behind it that people praise, or the great mind(s) behind the concepts. Colin°Talk 07:45, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science pearls-related deletion discussions.
That's a simplistic way of looking at this article: "As long as we have inclusion criteria, we can include anything that we want."Curb Chain (talk) 12:55, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I think everyone in this discussion wants Wikipedia pages to meet a high standard. It seems to me that there is potential for agreement on criteria for acceptable lists of publications, and these criteria are pretty much the same for all the lists. I invite everyone to visit the revamped Science pearls Wikiproject and discuss the criteria on the talk page. I would like to make a clear statement on the WikiProject page that could be used by all the lists. RockMagnetist (talk) 00:12, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do the citations really use the word "important"? Or are are editors reading the article and then using it as a citation deeming it "important" fitting the inclusion requirements of this list?Curb Chain (talk) 12:58, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all We are capable of judging the importance of things. We do it every time we select what we want to include in an article. We do it every time we hold an AfD discussion. That's not OR, except to the degree that research is to some extent an inevitable and necessary part of encyclopedia writing. DGG ( talk ) 22:43, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In a list it is different. The nature of these articles require synthesis. The nature of different articles is different; they may be hoaxes, they may be about films that have not been made yet, they maybe be copyright violations. That's not a judgement of importance.Curb Chain (talk) 23:03, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Have you actually read what WP:SYN is about? (See my comment below.) Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:17, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Rename to bibliography?

  • Keep and rename to Bibliography of Medicine. There are countless sources Bibliographies of Medicine. WP:list permits bibliographies and the sources show that books related to Medince have been listed as a group (duh a bibliography). Individual entries should be verified to a reliable bibliography but the list itself meets notability guidelines. --Mike Cline (talk) 19:46, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Did you look at the links Google returned? These aren't web pages. They are entire websites. Many have now been abandoned (computers index publications better than people). The NLM Bibliography of Celiac Disease alone contains 2,800 entries! The subject, Medicine, is of impractical size. Colin°Talk 20:45, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Impractical would not be my choice of words. Impractical is a cop out. If there are 10,000 books on the subject of Medicine that would be suitable for a Bibliography of Medicine, then there are 10,000. Nothing impractical about that. We have lots and lots of lists that are sub-lists of larger lists, with collective entries in the 1000s. A well done Bibliography of Medicine might have dozens of sublists that do indeed contain 1000s of entries. But there is no doubting the fact that a Bibliography of Medicine meets our notability criteria (members of the list discussed as a group). We just need to work at the best why to organize it, and ensure all the entries are sourced to reliable sources. Nothing impractical about that. Oh! BTW do the same search with Books. Lots of bibliographies show up as well. --Mike Cline (talk) 21:29, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
But what would the point of such a bibliography be? How are we to determine what gets included into the bibliography and what does not?Curb Chain (talk) 22:38, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Impractical is a completely reasonable reason for not having a single article on this. As DGG says below, the value of an encyclopaedia is that someone has made a selection, and we need to find a reasonable criteria for that. The "further reading" criteria is a good one as it imposes a natural editoral and encyclopaedic restraint on the list. We are not here to reproduce PubMed or any other broad index of publications. Colin°Talk 07:53, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Suggestion Mike asked me for comments about his suggestion . I do not think a complete bibliography of books in the field of medicine or anything else is encyclopedic, except for bibliographies of the works of a notable author. I think they fail NOT INDISCRIMINATE, and they are not of value to people who go to an encyclopedia , who are normally looking not for all possible information, but for the sort of selection of important information that is in an encyclopedia. There are appropriate places for such lists, particularly Open Library. Selected lists are another matter. We accept Additional Reading sections. They're not just accepted, they're a significant feature that should be added to every appropriate article substantial enough in coverage to make them reasonable. For example, at present the article Medicine does not have such a section. What we should do, regardless of the results at this AfD, is write one, and similarly for the other topics here that might not have them. Whether or not the articles are deleted, the list of books in them would make a good start. In conformity to the usual method for breakout articles, I'd propose calling them Additional reading in medicine (etc.). I do not see how anyone would find that objectionable. Of course it would take judgment about what to include, but it's the same judgment and the same material for whether they are in a section or a separate article. DGG ( talk ) 22:43, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is different from other Encyclopedias. We try not to judge what is important so they can pass inclusion into Wikipedia. To do so would be WP:OR.Curb Chain (talk) 00:40, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I highly doubt you will get support for that. There currently is no ==Further reading== in Medicine, and Medicine is so broad that such a list would be useless.Curb Chain (talk) 23:00, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That the section isn't there is not evidence that it is inappropriate or unneeded. I do not need support here to add such a section to this or any other article. The Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout guideline considers such sections a normal part of an article. You can of course challenge that guideline, or argue it does not apply to a particular article. You could also challenge individual items I added, but I would expect to be able to support any reasonable addition with a reference to a review or similar listing, though we do not ordinarily do that for such sections. DGG ( talk ) 00:22, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have created a discussion linking to this section at the WikiProject Science pearls site. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:02, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A further reading section is fine (and could break out into their own articles if justified). For Medicine it would include books that in themselves given an overview of the whole topic of medicine, or significant aspects of it such as history. It wouldn't list, for example, landmark papers on smoking like this one does and probably wouldn't list classic texts in ancient Greek. The purpose is to the give the reader further texts they can read on the whole topic of medicine. Not some academic exercise to list every "important", "landmark" or "notable" publication ever in the field of medicine, which would be of little value to anyone. Colin°Talk 07:53, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And how are we to determine notable? I don't see any sources out there and if we find compilations, we will have to synthesize them for our purposes which is against-policy.Curb Chain (talk) 12:57, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Learn the difference between synthesizing and surveying, Curb Chain. Nageh (talk) 16:36, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. WP:SYN is about taking one source that says A, another source that says B, and then combining them to say C. It is absolutely irrelevant in this discussion. If a source says that X is an important/landmark/etc. publication, then it can certainly be listed in a list of such things without running afoul of the WP:SYN policy. If there's a legitimate deletion rationale, this is not it. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:16, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Surveying is fine, but using judging them to be applicable to this article is WP:OR.Curb Chain (talk) 21:44, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What original research is being advanced? As far as I can tell, no one has specifically identified any original research in any of these deletion debates. Saying "It's WP:OR. LALALALALA..." is not an argument. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:06, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I fear your missing the point. it does not matter how well Cited individual entries in this list are. Somewhere in this, there needs to be a Cite from which the list is drawn from. Otherwise it is a list or what individual editors believe is important, not what a reliable Secondary source says is a List of important <stuff>. At its very most basic, this is a list of qualified <stuff>, Where is that list coming from? Exit2DOS • Ctrl • Alt • Del 18:13, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. A point that nobody has mentioned is that the criteria for lists in WP:LISTN is relatively new. It was introduced only early this year and that is long after this list and all the other lists of publications were started. I for one was unaware of this change to the Wikipedia:Notability guideline. Note too that it is guideline, not policy. I suspect that all the editors who have been editing these lists were also unaware of the change. I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability#Notability of lists. I suggest that the discussion there by people who spend time on this guideline is more relaxed about the criteria for list inclusion than some of the editors here using WP:LISTN as an argument for deletion. It is so new that it does not yet apply to a very large number of lists. We should be educating editors about this criteria and perhaps opening up the discussion on WP:LIST to see if some modification of the criteria should be introduced. Editors should then be given time to improve lists rather than deleting them now. --Bduke (Discussion) 22:03, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Relisting comment: An editor added <onlyinclude> tags to this AfD on 5 October 2011, which broke its transclusion on the daily AfD log. This AfD is therefore relisted to ensure that it is properly transcluded on the daily log for the required time.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, T. Canens (talk) 16:46, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize for this. I was trying to assemble arguments related to renaming articles in WIkipedia talk:WikiProject Science pearls, and didn't realize it would have side effects. RockMagnetist (talk) 18:01, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • For all its seven years of existence (seven years!) this list has had no more than nine entries. We've now found a book that consumed several people's publishing lifetimes to compile that contains nine thousand entries. And that makes this list worth keeping, apparently. The article traffic stats show this is at the "only bots are interested" level of page hits and its contents show that editors couldn't give a **** either. Given its incompleteness by many many orders of magnitude, this list is actually a negative source of information, has been for many years and will continue to be. Colin°Talk 22:26, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • You misunderstand my argument and throw WP:CAPITALLETTERS. Those aren't reasons to delete, sure. They are reasons to consider that perhaps the approach taken by the list is wrong. Fundamentally. As explained by several people. That means you can't fix it. Your SOFIXIT is insulting. Colin°Talk 15:50, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever the outcome of this AfD, editors need to work together to improve related content. If the concept of this list is fundamentally flawed, then "fixing it" includes rewriting, subdividing, distributing, renaming, and reworking. These are all things that can be discussed through article talk.
There is a famous story of a traveler who asked a local the way to a nearby place. The local replied "if I were going there, I wouldn't start from here". On Wikipedia, we have to start from here, even if it is often a very poor place to start. Geometry guy 21:58, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, "here" is Wikipedia. We shouldn't have such attachments to individual articles with specific names that any editorial decisions like "let's not do it that way; how about this instead" just get ignored because various guidelines and cultures mean it is practially impossible to delete mistakes. You know the story of the broom that has lasted for many decades. Only had two new heads and three new handles. That's what the "rewriting, subdividing, distributing, renaming, and reworking" becomes. If there's demand for WP to start having extensive out-of-article bibliographies for medical publications, then that sort of thing can be discussed at the wikiproject. Evidence shows that our current editors don't feel compelled to compile such lists. I'd far rather see a decent "Further reading" section in-article. I predict that in seven years time this list will still, embarrasingly, state that there are only nine important publications in medicine. Colin°Talk 07:19, 10 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Colin°Talk, much of what you say may well be right but none of it is relevant to the deletion discussion. Contrary to your opening statement, notability is precisely the topic of this discussion. If you want to change the way this list is done, there are plenty of better forums, including the talk page and the several wikiprojects listed on it. RockMagnetist (talk) 17:17, 10 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, the opening deletion point was on notability. But deletion discussions consider all aspects, not just what the OP stated. Writing on this article's talk page is not likely to be productive is it. Nobody edits it. And the delete positions have come from the most relevant wikiproject. I don't want to change the way this list is done. The list, if you look at it, isn't "done" in any meaning of the word. Nobody has felt inspired to expand this beyond a stub for seven years because it just isn't fundamentally what WP should be listing in one article. Further reading sections per topic article are a fine thing to do, but hard work as few folk have access to a major library. Few medicine articles have such sections to any degree. So expecting editors to expand this to cover all of medicine, a task many many orders of magnitude greater, is unrealistic. Maybe the maths editors are motivated by this sort of thing. So, rather than have another seven years of this embarrassment, we should just accept that it was a wrong move. Colin°Talk 18:22, 10 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
4 other such articles have been deleted: List of publications in law, list of publications in philosophy, (considering these 2 can be renamed and sourced with editorial judgement of what is important); List of important publications in biology; and List of important publications in sociology.Curb Chain (talk) 23:47, 10 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we should be trying to argue according to precedent here. This article needs to stand or fall on its own merits. Besides, another four "List of important publications..." articles were recently nominated and kept. Jowa fan (talk) 00:25, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
These articles are so similar that I believe we should use previous deletion debates to exclude article topics. It seems there's no standard here.Curb Chain (talk) 00:28, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This is a silly argument anyway. List of important publications in statistics was not deleted. There was a supermajority of "keep" votes at List of important publications in sociology, and List of important publications in biology was evenly split (without much compelling argument for deletion in any of these discussions, if you ask me). There was never any kind of real precedent. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:22, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We don't count votes. We count the merits of the argument.Curb Chain (talk) 17:09, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Good point. Let's see the merits of those arguments, then, rather than relying on arithmetic to settle the AfD either way. Sławomir Biały (talk) 18:38, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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