On 7/19/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Let me give you an example. If I were writing an article on a drug and I included the sentence "tyrosine is an amino acid", I would be expressing a relation that is learnt in secondary education. It being an amino acid is the first thing anyone would learn about tyrosine. Is this reference worthy?
Have a look at [[Tyrosine]]. The sentence in question reads:
"Tyrosine (from the Greek tyros, meaning cheese, as it was first discovered in cheese), 4-hydroxyphenylalanine, or 2-amino-3(4-hydroxyphenyl)-propanoic acid, is one of the 20 amino acids that are used by cells to synthesize proteins. "
While the factoid (the usual connotation is different but I like this word in the sense as the smallest information unit) tyrosine=amino acid is something a secondary school pupil in the industrialized world has learnt (that leaves about 4.5 billion people), the context itself is something that could live with a reference.
In this case, you can watch for redundancy: There are wikilinks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28biology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein
If these articles (especially the Amino acid one) is already heavily referenced, you feel a little more relaxed. Otherwise: Find a suitable reference that serves to provice information to any of the factoids (see above) in that sentence.
Mathias