Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PMID 8474513

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 Delete - This is original research.. —— Eagle 101 ^{(Need help?)} 20:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PMID 8474513

PMID 8474513 (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) - (View log)

Minor point is that the research paper's name is not the PubMed abstract number later given. this might suggest at least a rename/move.

• Furthermore PMID followed by a space is automatically externally linked by the wikimedia software and article names are not noramlly links offsite.

Major reason is that this is reporting of just one study, so:

• fails describe background to purpose of study (that screening might reduce rates of colon cancer)
• fails describe if advances knowledge or changes clinical practice (i.e. fails establish notability for inclusion in an encyclopaedia)
  • This of course needs great care as dewscribing how a large study is important or has changed clinical practice risks being personal opinion (i.e. fall foul of WP:No original research), unless one can cite reliable 3rd party sources to verify any claims made on behalf of the study's influence.
• Wikipedia is not a directory listings and that should include listing out all and any research papers.
• If this study has a major influence, then surely better as a footnoted citation in an updated Colorectal cancer or Fecal occult blood test articles.

These major points (re whether appropriate at all to have article on this paper) suggests to me an AfD David Ruben ^Talk 00:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete: This article is very nicely wikified, but wikipedia is not a directory of journal articles. Wouldn't it be an ideal world if all journals were freely available and published in cross-reference wiki format? To paraphrase Jimbo Wales, Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge... including scholarly research. Only problem is getting the print journals to allow concurrent publication in a wiki database. Dlodge 00:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, per the carefully laid-out points above. -- MarcoTolo 01:15, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. per nom. No WP:NOTABILITY asserted. What makes this particular study and paper (NB: not the broader scientific topic(s) in general) important beyond being a footnote or sentence in articles on the topic? DMacks 01:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete and move the material to colon cancer. Andrew73 02:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Journal articles would belong on Wikisource if they satisfy its inclusion policy. John Vandenberg 03:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Rename to Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study. As a result of my discussion with Badgettrg I am convinced that the topic is notable, and DGG has done the leg work to confirm the details. The current article text forms a good foundation for the expanded topic and it already also meets WP:V, so I dont see that the article must be rewritten before it is acceptable. I have added a todo list on the talk page listing a few of the suggestions that have been made during this Afd. John Vandenberg 06:20, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. —Brim 06:03, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
• Please keep for the moment - I do not see a problem with an article that reports one study. In fact, WikiPedia has many such examples. Look at Framingham Heart Study, Tuskegee study, Nurses' Health Study, British Doctors Study, National Comorbidity Study, Middletown studies, Whitehall Study, Heart Protection Study, Stanford prison experiment, Milgram experiment, Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study, The Gothenburg Study of Children with DAMP, 1964 Chesapeake Bay crossing study. Admittedly some of these are noted for historical reasons, but many are not. Some suffer from not having their numeric results summarized in a standard way that may influence the decision making of doctors and patients. Because the Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study (that we are discussing), and many other studies report their benefit in relative terms only, they can be misleading (see research on reporting problems: PMID 8474513, PMID 14687273, PMID 10612327, etc). I am hoping that PMID 8474513 leads to a template on scientific reporting. A decision to delete here for WP:NOTABILITY seems an arbitrary value judgment. So WikiPedia can have subtle Star Trek and Andy Griffith trivia, but cannot have a report of an article that affected people's health? WK has templates for baseball scores, but not for scientific reporting? If you delete this for lack of notability, you start a slippery slope - where do you draw the line? Does everyone have the same values on WP:NOTABILITY as you?

To me as the author, the better question is how to fix what I have started. Does an article in its first 24 hours of life have to be perfect to avoid deletion? The shortcomings listed above are accurate and I will get to them. The toughest point to fix that you make is the naming of this article - the article probably needs renaming. Keeping the [PMID] in the name helps it be linked to related content around the web (like shopping on the web with a model number rather than a description). Should the name be be 'Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study' as done by the studies listed above? Problem is that are multiple publications from the study and so this would not be a unique name. How about 'Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study (PMID: 7580661)'. This seems tedious, but better bibliographically.

This is a very interesting discussion. Regardless of the fate of this article, how is the current discussion archived? Please pardon any deviations I may take from WikiPedia norms, this is a new process to me.

Thanks - Badgettrg 11:39, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

• This study does not present itself as significantly notable enough to be compared with British Doctors Study, which has been running from 1951 to 2001. I'm sure the same applied to other studies you have mentioned. Note that British Doctors Study covers many publications related to the same study, rather than an individual publication on a topic. If the topic this article covers is comparable with the studies you have mentioned, the article needs to be expand to demonstrate this. A new article name will become apparent as a result of the expansion. John Vandenberg 13:10, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Reply - When I go to British Doctors Study and judge their original source (BMJ 1954), it has 211 citations in other medical journals per Institute for Scientific Information. The more recent article cited (BMJ 2004) has 135 citations. The Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study that I am reporting has 1231 citations. While I am perseverating on this one imperfect metric, the point of it is subjective judgments of notability of this study are risky.Badgettrg 14:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Reply. Those figures are a good start, but ground-breaking and scholarly are not sufficient to meet my notability yardstick. As the basis of my previous comment, I found 374 google hits on "British Doctors Study"; having briefly looked through those results, it appears that the study is referenced by govt agencies (other than the UK) and laymen, reinforcing its notability and reason for inclusion in Wikipedia. I've now done the same for "Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study" and found 343 hits, and they appear to put it in the same league.

  To a certain extent, inclusion will also be based on subjective judgements, and inclusion of this study will be used to justify the inclusion of others (if not on paper, it will certainly be used as rationale inside peoples heads). i.e. there is a slippery slope on the other side of this hill. I am definitely warming to this article being kept as Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study.

  Also, perhaps you can provide some detail regarding the relationship between this study and The Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota. John Vandenberg 21:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  The current discussion is archived indefinitely at this URL. If the outcome is to delete the article, the article (not this discussion) will disappear completely, except that it can be viewed by admins. If you wish to preserve the effort put into this article (e.g. in order to use the text in another article), back up the text yourself on a user subpage. John Vandenberg 13:10, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Reply - Thanks for the tip. I have now done so at user:Badgettrg.

• Delete. Journal articles are not inherently notable; notability needs to be shown by outside references like everything else. --Prosfilaes 13:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Reply - I think it very risky to judge the WP:notability of this article without expertise in both the clinical topic (colorectal cancer screening) and in medical publishing. I would not judge WP:notability outside domains of my expertise such as physics. What is the basis for judging notability here? Do we have a means for measuring of the notability of this article? According to the Institute for Scientific Information, this article has been cited by other medical journals 1231 times as of today. This makes is a very impactful study. Please explain the basis for Wikipedia allowing an article on Aunt Bee and not on one of the most important studies of colorectal cancer screening [personally, I like the The Andy Griffith Show show very much, so no offense intended towards its aficionados]?

  Here is more explanation of the purpose of my wanting to summarize and individual study. Editing medical articles to the highest standards of evidence-based medicine is very hard and time consuming. Summarizing individual studies in a structured way can help users reading this topic, and in addition, can be building blocks to help experts write the larger topic (in this case, screening for colorectal cancer). The summary I am working on is based on the work of others(PMID 15588311, PMID 15579428, PMID 15204609, PMID 15105349, PMID 14728311, PMID 11702349). In case anyone is worried, I have no conflict of interest in promoting this article. Actually, my choosing this article is based on its combination of very high impact (WP:notability) and substandard reporting (reliance on relative measures of efficacy rather than absolute measures) on its original publication. thanks - Badgettrg 14:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Reply: I agree this is a very nice summary and is quite constructive on Wikipedia; however Wikipedia is not a directory of journal articles. Perhaps a Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study page would be more fitting, with a summary of each journal article derived from the project on a subpage. I think this would probably be better than incorporation into the colon cancer page (main or as a sub page). Dlodge 16:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

  Concur. Now we're talkin'. What's really important here...the article itself or the study it's reporting? The latter is more plausible in my mind, and is easier to support and more relevant to a wider audience. DMacks 17:59, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep, Delete the wiki is always asking for verifiable data and this is it, and page references could link to pages like this one. I guess that the editor is new to the wiki (please correct me if I am wrong), so I feel that allowances could be made for this. Presentation and readability could be improved, but it is a good idea in my opinion, for what it might become. In may be encyclopaedic to list notable papers. The wiki is not short of space. There is a science in summarising and evaluating research articles and the wiki should not ignore this science. It may be new to the wiki, but the techniques and methods of evaluating statistical medical papers is a science in its own right. It is wiki policy to start articles at a simple level and works up to a very technical level for technical readers and both general and technical readers might want to see some evidence, if it is well presented. If this is deleted perhaps the author should write a new page on an paper that is undoubtedly notable. Snowman 17:30, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Rethink - It might be better as part of a meta-analyis of the subject in-the-round, probably not notable enough by itself, probably should be part of a discussion of the topic. Snowman 23:26, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete + move content. The study is significant-- but it doesn't meet the threshold of notable for WP IMHO. The content of the article belongs in the article fecal occult blood test. Nephron  T|C 01:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete - as proposer. David Ruben ^Talk 04:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete A Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study might be a worthy article but I can't judge that, nor should it be up to us editors to judge. If the study is widely referenced in review articles, textbooks and other media then it could be said to be important. This article is no more accessible than the original paper, making it too close to the primary source. In fact, the paper's abstract is more accessible – its concluding sentence contains the essential information that is just not apparent in the article. An encyclopedia must help to reader understand the significance of the results and probably the actual raw figures are not helpful to quote. Interpretation is vital but must draw on secondary sources rather than the editor's own abilities. Colin°^Talk 22:13, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
• Very Strong Keep and Move to Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study , about which there are, according of PubMed, 251 articles. A major long-term clinical study reported in NJEM is notable, since this is the most prestigeous international journal for the reports of these study--no. 1 in Impact Factor in medicine in Science Citation Reports for decades. (don't be put off by "New England"--it means, among other things "Harvard Medical School" and its affiliated hospitals.) We do not have to judge notability, because there are secondary sources to report: first, the editors and peer-reviewewrs of NEJM, second, the authors of all the 251 other articles; This is not OR, this a report in a prestigious journal of the results of research. as CH said, "if the study is widely referenced.." and so it is--of the articles about it 29 are review articles, iincluding a review for Annals of Internal medicine, & Archives of Internal medicine, the 2 top internal medicine journals, and JAMA. It does not belong in fecal occult blood test, although that is one of the topics studied. The only problem is that this WP article has been naively edited.

This particular paper would be one of the referebces, though the main one, because apparently --following the links in PubMed, it is the major publication of the results. Though we're not a medical encyclopedia, it meets the tests for science--under the name of the study of course. CH, either you or I could upgrade it--WP should have gotten this study in earlier. Please rethink and re-comment.DGG 03:52, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

In terms of this AfD review, both the title and content are currently unsuitable for WP, so I still think delete is the appropriate choice. You make very a good case for Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study. A newly created article would start with information from the review/book sources and work down to details from the original paper as and where necessary. The British Doctors Study would be a good model to follow but it could be longer with more detail if warranted. I'm not qualified to "upgrade this", nor do I have access to the journals and books required. WikiProject Medicine should be able to help, and I'd be happy to post a request there once this AfD review is complete. Colin°^Talk 09:37, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

• move to Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study and then fix other problems, expand, per above suggestions. Pete.Hurd 04:22, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
• Move to a more suitable article name. Clean up and expand article and add reliable references to establish article's notability. ← ANAS ^Talk? 02:50, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete • Torches and pitchforks optional. :) More seriously, the article is incoherent, a single study, and probably constitutes original research. Cheers, ✎ Peter M Dodge ( Talk to Me • Neutrality Project ) 19:30, 18 January 2007 (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.