Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychology/How to write a psychology article

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This essay gives some tips and guidelines for writing about psychology on Wikipedia.

Remember that you can contribute usefully to Wikipedia's psychology coverage without writing a whole article. You can copy-edit articles, assess their quality, or review Good Article candidates, peer review candidates or Featured Article candidates. You can find sources to support unreferenced statements or give expert attention to an article that has become muddled. You can improve the Psychology Portal or create templates for navigation or information.

What to write about

All article topics must be notable, meaning they must have received significant coverage in multiple reliable sources that are independent of the subject. If you create an article whose subject isn't notable, expect it to be deleted.

A phenomenon, effect or process: How is it demonstrated? Under what conditions does it happen? Are there individual or cultural differences? What are the theoretical explanations?
A disorder or therapy: What are its preconditions? How is it detected or practiced? How was it discovered or developed? What are the alternatives?
An overview of an area: A single article cannot address all the complexities of a topic such as memory. Instead an overview is expected to summarise the key issues, leaving finer detail to separate articles.
A theory: What does it purport to explain? What are its criticisms and limits? Who developed it? How has it developed?
A research technique: How it is used? What results has it yielded? Who pioneered it?
A scientist: What are their major contributions? What professional recognition have they achieved? Where have they worked? If the article is about a living person, it is essential that you follow Wikipedia's rules about biographies of living persons.
An institution or group such as a research group, school of thought, or professional society: What progress in the field is it associated with? What are the significant events in its history? Who are its notable members?
A book: See WP:WikiProject Books/Non-fiction article Note that the article has to be written primarily from third-party sources, not just the book itself.
A list: Think very carefully before creating a list article about psychology. Psychological phenomena can have vague definitions which change over time; there can be controversies about how to categorise them; and different theories can use conflicting terminology. If there is no checkable, objective criterion for inclusion or exclusion from the list, then it is hard to define improvement of the list, and so effort is wasted as editors pull in different directions.

Consult the notability noticeboard if you don't know whether a topic merits its own article.

Titles to avoid

Terminology used by just one author: Sometimes an author will create an idiosyncratic term just to make their explanations clear and engaging. These are not usually notable enough for a Wikipedia article, and should not receive the same prominence as widely established terms. For example, in Thinking and Deciding, Jonathan Baron writes about the Neutral-evidence principle in the course of explaining Illusory correlation and other biases. "Illusory correlation" is used by many authors, so the term deserves its own article, while "Neutral-evidence principle" is just an explanatory device used within Baron's text. To give them the same prominence would mislead readers about the literature.
Terminology used by no sources: Titles should be based as far as possible on existing terminology. If you find yourself creating a new term to title the article, then that's a strong indication that the article is not separately notable and needs to be absorbed into another topic. If a researcher called Smith is associated with some notable research, it is not for Wikipedia to call it "The Smith principle" or "The Smith syndrome". It is up to the academic community to decide what to associate Smith's name with. After all, Smith might go on to even more significant findings.

Integration

Remember that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and Wiktionary is the dictionary. Users come to the encyclopedia not primarily to get definitions of technical terms, but to be guided through the topic: what questions does psychology ask, how they are investigated, and what has been discovered? Hence users are better served by an overview article than by a lot of stub articles. It follows that you may be able to improve the encyclopedia by merging content from many short articles into an overview of a whole area, if such an overview doesn't already exist.

Sourcing

You should be familiar with the guidelines at WP:SOURCES (commonly referred to as WP:RS). Since psychology is a science, articles should be based predominantly on scholarly sources, including:

Academic textbooks
Review papers
Peer-reviewed research, including papers and monographs
Popularisations by a scientist

Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine-related articles) may be helpful in psychology articles generally, and is essential reading if you edit any articles that overlap with medicine.

It is strongly recommended that you include DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) or PMIDs (PubMed Identifiers) where they exist. These signal (imperfectly) that a source is part of academic literature. Bookmark Help:Citation tools, or link to it from your user page: these tools give you lots of ways to quickly generate a full, formatted Wikipedia citation.

On a given psychological topic such as Hindsight bias, there may be several hundred published research reports. Only the most significant need to be cited in the Wikipedia article. Sources that provide an overview or integration, including textbooks or review papers, can help you choose these. Hence the ideal references are research reports which have been summarised in a textbook, review or popularisation. This demonstrates both that the research comes from a credible, peer-reviewed source, and that it is highly relevant to understanding the article's topic. You can convey this with a "via" link, i.e. [full citation of the paper] via [full citation (including pages) of the source which summarises it].

Even if the textbook summary of the research is useful, it is a good idea to track down the original research paper if at all possible, because different authors have different taste in what they leave out, and the report may provide interesting details that help you write an engaging article.

Theories and terminology can change over time, so it is worth thinking about which senses and which explanations to use. Users are best served by an up-to-date account, and also one which is not biased to one particular point of view. Ideally, the article's terminology should be guided by an overview (such as a textbook or review paper) that is recent (from the last five to ten years, depending on the field). If you have a few such sources you can create an overview which is more useful than any one of them in isolation. Once you settle on the terminology you are going to use, explain controversies and historical developments within the article text.

Sources to avoid

Many types of source are usually inappropriate, but there will be exceptions. Even though you cannot rely on them as sources, they can help you find published research reports, and they can illustrate how to write about the topic in an accessible style.

Press releases: Universities frequently issue press releases about new research. These do not give enough details for an encyclopedic summary and may give a false impression of its importance.
Blogs: The many blogs discussing psychological research may be useful as pointers to authoritative sources, but not usually as sources themselves. Blog posts by named, qualified experts may be useful as external links: consult What to link
News coverage: Whether through misunderstanding or deliberate bias, news coverage can often distort and even reverse the conclusions of scientific research. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog and newspaper column discuss many examples of this. There are exceptions. A detailed piece of investigative journalism about a piece of research may be useful for adding detail to an article based mainly on textbooks and academic journals. See for example "Don’t! : The secret of self-control" in the New Yorker.
Preprints: These are pieces of research which have not been accepted by an academic journal or publisher but which have been made available by the author. Peer review serves an important function in weeding out errors; research that has not passed this hurdle would not normally be suitable for an encyclopedia. If a preprint is mentioned, it should definitely not be given the same weight as established sources.
Raw data: Wikipedia's policies forbid original research. Our role is not to draw conclusions, but summarise the conclusions already reached in academic literature.
Sources derived from Wikipedia itself: For example, the reference articles on Science Daily, such as "amygdala" are copied from Wikipedia, so cannot be used as sources.
Fringe sources: Pseudoscience must be labelled as such. Even if a theory has academic supporters and is the subject of experimental research, if it is generally regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community, this must be made clear when it is discussed on Wikipedia. To do a service to its readers, Wikipedia's coverage of psychology must distinguish amateur, fringe and 'pop' psychology from reputable research.

The reliable sources noticeboard can be consulted if there is a dispute about the suitability of sources. You are also likely to find someone with relevant expertise at WikiProject Psychology.

Citations

The use of parenthetical citations, such as those used by APA style, are deprecated. Appropriate inline citation is described at Wikipedia:Citing sources, and if you're just getting started, see Help:Referencing for beginners.

The most relevant of the common citation templates for psychology are:

{{cite journal}}
{{cite book}}

Other citation templates that are useful for psychology include:

{{cite APA Dictionary of Psychology}} (shortcut: {{cite APA Dictionary}})
International Classification of Diseases (ICD) templates - while not originally intended for use in citations, they are helpful when citing the ICD
- {{ICD10}} - the majority of research has used this version, as it was in effect globally for several decades
- {{ICD11}} - came into effect globally on 1 January 2022

Writing style

Wikipedia is written for a lay audience, and so requires a different style from an academic work or student essay. All you can assume about readers of the English Wikipedia is that they understand English, and not necessarily at a high level.

The lead of the article needs to give an orientation for someone who is totally unfamiliar with the topic. If the article's topic is something that happens to people make that clear. If a theory is a theory of memory, make that clear. If a scientist is a social psychologist, make that clear.
Technical terms are fine: part of the usefulness of the article is in helping people understand those terms. However, all technical terms need to be defined, usually where they first appear in the article. Don't leave technical terms hanging in the lead. Rather than "the two main theories of fidgeting are the One Phase theory and the Two Phase theory", explain the difference as succinctly as you can.
Keep an encyclopedic, formal tone. Avoid first-person or second-person language. "When people dream" rather than "When you dream". "Human evolutionary heritage" rather than "Our evolutionary heritage".
Don't presume the external validity of research. Don't write that "psychologists have found that men fidget more than women" if the sources do not use such general terms. If the sources say that, in an experiment with university students, the male subjects fidgeted more than the female subjects, then write it as a sentence about those subjects rather than about men and women in general. If the same effect has been replicated many times with different subjects, say so. If the sources do not make the leap to say that men are more fidgety than women, neither can we.

While there is no MOS for psychology articles (yet!), if an entire article is relevant to medicine - for example, Autism or sertraline - it will need to follow MOS:MED. As a rule of thumb, articles which describe disorders, treatments, or anatomy are relevant to medicine. However, articles outside that scope may still be relevant to medicine - use common sense to decide if MOS:MED would apply.

Crediting research

Avoid bracketed citations in the text itself. Many of us learnt (Smith & Jones 1999) to insert these citations (Ackbar & Jeff 1995) in our essays as undergraduates (Laurel & Hardy 1931). On Wikipedia, however, it is important not to interrupt the flow of the text. What's more, they are unnecessary given Wikipedia's footnote system: use the <ref> tag for all citations. Take a look at the examples of citation styles and decide how you want the references to work.
Research results are not mere opinion. It is much more important to describe the method used to reach results, rather than name the researcher. Instead of, "Smith found that..." it is better to have, "A comparison against a control group found that..." It is not important to credit experiments to named scientists in the text, unless the researcher in question is pivotal to that topic.
By contrast with research results, scientists' opinions, interpretations and criticisms need to be credited to named individuals. If a position is a scientific consensus position, endorsed by a scientific body, say so.

For citing papers or book chapters, you will often need two page ranges. One is the number of pages in the book or journal occupied by the paper or chapter. The other page reference is for the page(s) that are used for a specific reference. One way to do this is to put the full citation of the chapter or paper in the references section, then use the Harv and Harvnb templates for inline references. See the Confirmation bias article for an example.

Finding images

Any images you use in the article need to have an appropriate copyright status. The first place to look is Wikimedia Commons, which has hundreds of images in its Psychology category.

Categorising the article

To help people find articles, they will get categorised based on topic. Firstly, the talk page of articles related to psychology should have the template {{WikiProject Psychology |class= |importance=}} at the top of the page. This adds it to the tracking categories for this project, so we know to assess it and help maintain it. The article itself should have one or more of the subcategories of Category:Psychology at the bottom of the page, in the format [[Category:CategoryName]]. If your article is still a draft, please include the category with a colon at the start, i.e. in the format [[:Category:CategoryName]]. This prevents it from being added to the category, which is necessary as drafts should not be in categories for articles.