 | This page documents an English Wikipedia content guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page. |
The no original research and verifiability policies are of paramount importance to Wikipedia. Inline citations, which link specific reliable sources with specific pieces of information in the article, provide practical support for these policies by making it easier to check the article content.
This page applies the advice in the policies, and in the citing sources guideline, to referencing science and mathematics articles. The goal is to achieve a reasonable balance between ease of verification, readability and editability. This page also describes some sensible guidelines for dealing with issues that are specific to writing Wikipedia articles (compared to writing for the academic press).
Footnotes (<ref> tags) are used in examples throughout this page. Parenthetical referencing was a different type of referencing used on Wikipedia until September 2020, when a community discussion reached a consensus to deprecate parenthetical referencing. Do not change any article's established citation style without discussing it first.