Pharmacopedia:Sources

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This page describes how Pharmacopedia.wiki sources its content: what kinds of sources we cite, how we rank them, what external vocabularies we link out to, and what licensing applies in each direction.

It is the public counterpart to the editorial sourcing standards used internally by Pharmacopedia editors and reviewers.

Sourcing hierarchy

Pharmacopedia editorial work follows a citation hierarchy. When multiple source types are available for the same claim, the higher-tier source takes precedence. When sources of equivalent tier disagree, the disagreement is surfaced explicitly per the editorial integrity refusals.

The hierarchy:

Primary literature. Peer-reviewed clinical trials, observational studies, mechanism research published in indexed journals. Cited with full author list, journal, year, DOI or PMID.
Regulatory documents. FDA labels, EMA SmPCs, MHRA, PMDA, Health Canada equivalents. Used for marketed-indication, dosing, contraindication, and pharmacokinetic data. Cited with version date.
Meta-analyses and systematic reviews. Cochrane, NICE evidence reviews, AHRQ comparative-effectiveness reviews. Used for synthesized clinical claims.
Clinical practice guidelines. Specialty-society guidelines (APA, AHA, NICE, WHO, etc.). Used for standard-of-care framing.
Tertiary references. Textbooks, clinical handbooks, established pharmacology references. Used for foundational pharmacology and well-settled material.
Ethnobotanical and historical sources. Peer-reviewed ethnobotany, anthropological literature, primary historical documents (in the Traditional perspective).
Patient-experience sources. Patient-organization documentation, qualitative research on lived experience, structured patient-experience aggregation (in the Patient perspective, with clear methodological framing).

A claim without any source is not a Pharmacopedia claim. Editors mark unsourced material with [citation needed]; reviewers do not approve a claim into the published surface without at least one cited source.

Per-Perspective sourcing standards

Pharmacopedia renders each medicine page across four editorial perspectives. Each perspective applies the hierarchy above with its own emphasis:

Clinician (colleague-to-colleague clinical depth): primary literature, regulatory documents, guidelines, meta-analyses dominate. Pharmacology references support foundational claims.
Patient (warm, careful, medically literate friend): primary literature for clinical claims; regulatory documents for prescribing-information facts; patient-experience sources contextualize what living with a medicine looks like.
Traditional (thoughtful ethnobotanist or historian): peer-reviewed ethnobotany and anthropology; primary historical sources; indigenous-knowledge sources cited respectfully and with attribution to the holding community where the community has published or authorized the reference.
Researcher (methods-section style): primary literature dominates; methodology, sample size, effect sizes, and replication status are quoted; the writing is structured for a reader who will go read the cited paper.

Where a claim is made across multiple perspectives, the highest-tier source standing behind any one perspective applies to all of them; each perspective's render reflects how that perspective contextualizes the same evidence.

"Reviewed YYYY-MM-DD" badge

Each Pharmacopedia claim carries a last-reviewed date. Pages display the freshness of their underlying claims via a per-claim badge. When a claim's last-reviewed date crosses a staleness threshold (currently 24 months), the badge displays a "review pending" state and the claim enters the editorial review queue.

This system is part of the data infrastructure work in progress. See the Newsroom for the rollout schedule.

External vocabularies Pharmacopedia links to

Pharmacopedia medicine and problem pages link out to external biomedical vocabularies. This makes Pharmacopedia interoperable with electronic health records, pharmacy systems, research databases, and other downstream consumers.

The vocabularies we link out to fall into three groups by licensing posture:

Cleared for cross-reference

These vocabularies are public-domain or open-licensed. Pharmacopedia stores their identifiers as cross-references on each relevant page, renders them as linked badges, and serves them via the public read API.

Vocabulary	Identifier scope	License	Notes
RxNorm	US drug nomenclature	US Government public domain (NLM)	Maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. Free for all use including commercial.
MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)	Biomedical topic indexing	US Government public domain (NLM)	Used in PubMed indexing. Free for all use.
Wikidata	Cross-domain entity identifiers	CC0 (public domain dedication)	Pharmacopedia consumes Wikidata IDs as cross-refs and, post-launch, requests that PCP-PIDs be added as a Wikidata property.

Under licensing review

These vocabularies are widely used in clinical informatics but their licensing terms restrict redistribution in specific ways. Pharmacopedia is reviewing each one to determine whether and how we can use them in cross-references. Until the review is complete, we do not display these identifiers on user-facing pages, even where we have them in internal data.

Vocabulary	Status	Open question
DrugBank	Under review	DrugBank's Public Use license permits non-commercial academic use but restricts redistribution. Whether displaying a DrugBank ID as a cross-reference badge constitutes redistribution is the open question.
ATC (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical classification)	Under review	ATC is maintained by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Drug Statistics Methodology. The WHO Centre charges for commercial use of the ATC system; Pharmacopedia is nonprofit, so the question is whether displaying an ATC code in a non-commercial Pharmacopedia page is in scope of the free educational-use carve-out.
UMLS-bridged identifiers (SNOMED CT, ICD-10, ICD-11, LOINC where they sit under UMLS)	Under review	UMLS is licensed by the NLM under terms that require user registration. Whether transitively-derived UMLS identifiers displayed on a public page require Pharmacopedia to track its readers as UMLS users is the open question.

When reviews complete, this section is updated and the affected vocabularies move into the cleared-for-cross-reference table above. The Newsroom logs each update.

Not used

Pharmacopedia does not cross-reference proprietary commercial drug-information databases (Micromedex, Lexicomp, Clinical Pharmacology, etc.). Those products are valuable inside the institutions that subscribe to them; Pharmacopedia's job is to be the freely available source, not to link to paywalled ones.

Pharmacopedia's own identifiers

Pharmacopedia issues its own permanent identifiers per page and per claim. The format is:

 pcp:<type>:<base32>

Where <type> is page, claim, or one of a small set of structured types, and <base32> is a stable suffix. Once issued, an identifier resolves forever, even if the page is renamed or merged. See Pharmacopedia:Permanent identifiers for the full specification when it is published.

Reuse: how to cite Pharmacopedia

Pharmacopedia content is freely reusable under CC BY-SA 4.0 (see Pharmacopedia:Reciprocity for AI-training specifics). When citing a Pharmacopedia page in your own writing, the recommended forms are:

Chicago: "<Page Title>." Pharmacopedia. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD. https://pharmacopedia.wiki/wiki/<Page_Title>
APA: Pharmacopedia. (YYYY). <Page Title>. Retrieved YYYY-MM-DD from https://pharmacopedia.wiki/wiki/<Page_Title>
Vancouver: Pharmacopedia [Internet]. <Page Title>. [cited YYYY-MM-DD]. Available from: https://pharmacopedia.wiki/wiki/<Page_Title>
BibTeX: Each page emits a @misc BibTeX entry via the citation widget in the page chrome.

Once per-claim PIDs are live, citations may also point to individual claims via:

 https://pharmacopedia.wiki/p/<pcp-claim-PID>

This is recommended when the citing work depends on a specific factual assertion within a Pharmacopedia page rather than the page as a whole.

Revision

This page was locked on 2026-05-28 as part of the institutional identity commitments. The "under licensing review" table changes as reviews complete; those updates are logged on Newsroom and reflected here without a separate revision-log entry. Structural changes to the sourcing hierarchy or the per-Perspective standards are material revisions and are logged here.