Template:Medical citations needed

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Usage

This template is intended to be placed at the top of articles or sections with medical or health content that need additional references or are using sources that are unreliable and/or outdated, and are, therefore, in need of attention.

If the article or section does not cover medical or health sciences topics, you should use another template, such as {{Refimprove}}, instead.

The template places the articles into Category:All articles needing additional references.

This template additionally adds the article to Category:Articles needing additional medical references and its subcategories. This allows editors who keep an eye on medical content concerns to find articles in need of attention quickly.

Please add a date parameter. Adding a date parameter sorts the article into one of the dated subcategories of Category:Articles needing additional medical references and out of the parent category, allowing the oldest problems to be identified and dealt with first. Additionally, it saves bots having to add the date, keeping article edit histories tidy.

Parameters

All parameters are optional; please always add a date.

• |section   (Must be the first parameter)
• |date=
• |reason=
• |talk=1   (Or any other nonblank value)
• |small=left

• If the first parameter is section, the normally sized warning starts "This section ..." rather than "This article ...". (For compatibility with earlier versions of the template, any other unnamed first parameter is treated as a reason. Please explicitly use |reason=.)
• If you would like to add a reason, add the parameter |reason=.
• To point to the Talk page with discussion of the issues, use |talk=1.
• To produce a small version to use within a section, use |small=left; section isn't needed as a first parameter because neither "article" nor "section" is displayed.

Examples

{{Medical citations needed|{{subst:DATE}}}}

Paste-ready version; the month and year are added automatically.

{{Medical citations needed|section|{{subst:DATE}}}}

Paste-ready version; the month and year are added automatically. This places a normally sized box within a section.

{{Medical citations needed|date=December 2024}}

Paste-ready version; with month and year.

{{Medical citations needed|talk=1|{{subst:DATE}}}}

Paste-ready version for an article with pointer to the article talk page for details; with month and year.

{{Medical citations needed|reason=Information on foo does not cite any references or sources|date=December 2024}}

Paste-ready version for an article with date and a reason given.

{{Medical citations needed|small=left|{{subst:DATE}}}}

Paste-ready version reduced in size for use in a section of an article; with month and year (not displayed on template).

See also

• {{Medical citation needed}} – adds:
• {{Unreliable medical source}} – adds:
• {{RSPlease}} – a note for user talk pages with links to WP:MEDRS
• {{Refimprove science}} – for non-medical scientific articles

Policies, guidelines, essays, and wikiprojects

Medicine-specific

• Vickers, Tim and Eubulides (30 June 2008). "Dispatches: Sources in biology and medicine"". The Wikipedia Signpost.
• Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (natural sciences)
• Wikipedia:Reliable source examples § Physical sciences, mathematics and medicine
• Wikipedia:Conflicts of interest (medicine)
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Resources, external resources useful for writing medicine related content

General

• Wikipedia:Verifiability
• Wikipedia:Citing sources, especially § Unsourced material
• Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources
• Wikipedia:Independent sources
• Wikipedia:Third-party sources
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check