Wikipedia:Scientific peer review/Cerebral hypoxia

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Cerebral hypoxia[edit]

This is my first article. I would very much appreciate feedback of any sort. Egfrank 19:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion has also been added to Wikipedia:Peer review. This discussion page is now common to both Peer Review and Scientific Peer Review, so the deabye occurs in this one place. --Bduke 22:56, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks -- Egfrank 03:15, 21 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It looks pretty good to me. A few comments:

  • The first set of categorisations don't appear to have a reference, the ref guidelines for medical articles suggest inline citation for things even if they're covered by the general refs. There are one or two other places where a paragraph doesn't have any refs, might be good to check they are covered by the refs in adjacent paragraphs. Generally the referencing looks robust though.
  • You might like to standardise the reference style using citation templates so the reference title rather than the raw URL gets hyperlinked.
  • A lot of the paragraphs are very short, and it might flow a bit better if some of them were combined, particularly in the lead section.
  • It's no longer a stub - I removed the tag for you!
  • Are there likely to be any appropriate images you could add? It would make it look prettier, but I have no idea whether there would be anything relevant.

Good stuff, keep up the good work. Eve 14:03, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

please clarify - first set of categories missing in-line reference? - the in-line reference #1 - the on line edition of the Gale Encyclopedia of Neurological Disorders - is associated with this categorization. Did you mean something else?
You're right, sorry. I must have missed it somehow, sorry. I was obviously having a blonde day... ;p Eve 18:39, 31 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm taking a look at the introduction, and you should definitely take a look at Wikipedia:Lead section. Some issues I've noticed:

  • The first sentence should include the bolded title, such as "Cerebral hypoxia is a general term for..."
  • All the information in the lede should be also be discussed elsewhere in the article. The lede gives plenty of causes of cerebral hypoxia, but such causes aren't adequately discussed. You should consider making a section on the causes of cerebral hypoxia.
  • Inversely, all of the information in the article should be summarized in the lede. There's a good section on treatment methods, some of which should be included in the lede.
  • The third paragraph is actually one sentence, and a poorly constructed one at that. It's actually just two lists, and the second list, "or any other event that severely interferes with the intake of oxygen, its transfer to the blood stream, its transport to the brain, its ability to pass through the blood-brain barrier, or its metabolism by the brain" is way too long. You could truncate that whole snake down to "or any other event that severely interferes with the body's ability to handle oxygen" or something along those lines.
  • Be careful about making phrases overly complicated without adequately explaining or linking them. Here's a sample from the Prognosis section: "Recent research suggests this may be due to an autoimmune response caused by CO induced changes in the myelin sheath surrounding neurons." I have no idea what that means. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 01:02, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Thank you for your comments.
  • The comments about overlong sentences are quite helpful as well as the need to explain some of the more technical comments such as "CO induced changes in the myelin sheath".
  • You make a good point about the need to clarify the relationship between cerebral hypoxia and its various causes, however, I'm not sure how to handle this. At this point I have a problem of exploding scope. Cerebral hypoxia isn't just a symptom, its a dynamic that is central to the process of brain death. In other words, almost anything that can kill you must at some point trigger cerebral hypoxia.
  • My other concern is reinventing the wheel. There are reasonably well developed articles on most of the causes of cerebral hypoxia and I don't want to rewrite articles that have already been written.
  • One solution would be to move to a summary article format. This would allow enough of a lead-in to save people from having to look up each and every cause in a separate wiki article. However, given the many many different causes of cerebral hypoxia even this would be time consuming.
  • I believe this would be a worthwhile solution. Unfortunately, I don't have the time for this kind of expansion - perhaps there is someone else that would like to take this article under their wing? Egfrank 12:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
OK, as a provisional solution, I have moved the paragraphs listing causes into their own "Causes" section (after classification). The intro now focuses the notion of severe and mild hypoxia - a concept that is developed throughout the article.
This new "Causes" section needs some further development. It contains little more than a regrouping of causes listed in the previous classification section. Any ideas of how this should be fleshed out would be welcome. Egfrank 13:51, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an idea: Try breaking up the causes into different categories, and give each category its own paragraph or subsection. Expand upon each category and give selected examples. I don't know how well this would work, but it's worth a try. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:26, 12 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am not an expert in cerebral hyopxia, so I won't give content feedback, but here's a style suggesstion: When citing medical journal articles, it is a good idea to link to the corresponding PubMed citation for the convenience of the reader. If you use Template:Cite journal and include the PubMed ID number ("| pmid = "), it creates an automatic link. Good luck with this and future projects! - Rustavo 17:34, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]