Talk:Mind-body therapies

Citation

Hoist on yer own petard...if you're going to cite Medical Subject Headings, give the full citation, please. I'm also puzzled about the choice of actually mentioning the source in the text and yet not using an exact quotation for our definition. I would say either give an exact quotation (with quotation marks) or else move the mention of MSH into a footnote. --Larry Sanger 22:06, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

There are a fair number of existing articles that simply say National Library of Medicine, and only sometimes Medical Subject Headings, and are near-direct quotes although not in quotations. I thought it was an accepted quotation since this is the basic public domain resource for medical indexing. Grammatically, the direct quote usually won't work, so I suppose a footnote can be used -- although it won't say much besides "National Library of Medicine, Medical Subject Headings" as it's a browser for the database; I don't think the URLs are persistent. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:42, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I repeat: we should give the full resource citation if we make any citation at all. Those NLM references should be completed as well. (Why shouldn't they be?) As to quotation marks, my basic problem was that the wording made it unclear whether the text was an exact quotation or not. As you know, changing just one or two words in a definition can make a huge difference. Since you put the reference in the footnote, I think it is not as important that we clarify whether it's an exact quotation or not. (Of course, if you did use quotation marks in the article, then you should also say in the text of the article who is being quoted.) I see that the entire text of the article, except for the last sentence, is currently just a quotation from MSH. Yes, I agree that it's usable without further attribution.

I'll bet the URLs are persistent. If not, that's what "accessed on" notes are for... --Larry Sanger 03:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I can't speak for NLM specifically, but, admittedly some time ago but I'm reasonably sure the software isn't radically different, I used to be the network architect for the Library of Congress. The legislative retrieval system, THOMAS, was not new-each-time, but the URLs would persist on the order of days. There were some internal wrap-around counters, so the actual duration would depend on activity. The full search URL, however, would be repeatable.

I suppose I don't really understand the utility of "accessed on", at least for something like MeSH, or Library of Congress cataloging subject authority or name authority. In practice, they don't change; even if there were an error, it would be more likely that the catalogers would introduce a new term and deprecate the old one. Once these are published, there's no practical way to roll them out of all the databases into which they've propagated. Dana wasn't happy that in one of the multiple NLM hierarchies, homeopathy is listed as a subset of spiritual therapies, but I've known enough staff there to know how hard they'd laugh when asked to change. Before there was MEDLINE, there was the paper Index Medicus, and the indexing vocabularies got supplements, but not changes. Howard C. Berkowitz 04:35, 3 January 2009 (UTC)