Proper standards of evidence and referencing

I had thought that there was a previous topic about this but I can't find it anymore.What is the right sort of level of evidence that we should be bringing to the scientific debates on tis site? This question has re-entered my mind because of the discussions which I had with Jerry Don Bauer on the now closed 'Intelligent design in universities' thread.Both Mammuthus and I provided Jerry with references to the primary scientific literature, which I would consider pretty much standard for a good scientific reference.Jerry raised the fair point that the papers I referenced were not all available in full over the internet, at least without subscriptions to the journals, and consequently not easily accessable by many people.I appreciate this problem and when possible I try to reference papers from open access journal such as PLOS or the BiomedCentral suite of journals or from the PubMed Central archive of full text papers. Should we avoid putting froward the paper that best demonstrates a particular area of research simply because it is not generally available?Jerry had a number of other arguments which I was not so convinced by. He suggested in an exchange with Mammuthus- Now I am not familiar with this particular ettiquette and it certainly isn't something covered in the forum guidelines here, although I have no doubt it may operate on a number of forums. Is there any reason why we should accede to someone elses particular preference for a form of reference?Jerry himself seems to prefer links to websites, and I think that this is a problematic issue. I have complained before about the highly unreliable nature of the content of websites (especially the NMSR one on the Nylon Bug, but I digress). You can probably find some site on the web to back up even the most ludicrous of assertions but it doesn't constitute any sort of evidence.Of course some sites are better than others, we might lend more credence to a site hosted at a .edu .gov or .ac address, some of us might trust Talk.Origins over Answers in Genesis. But both for TO and AIG they give references to the primary literature to support their views and the only real way to check whether the papers actually do support them is to go to the primary literature.This isn't intended to be any sort of attack on Jerry, its just that my debate with him threw some of these questions into sharp relief in my mind.What are people's feelings on the appropriate standard of reference to provide support for arguments on a forum such as this? Is there any way to enforce such standards? How far should we be prepared to lower our standards in order to engage in a debate?I don't know the answers to these. My own personal feelings tend towards the draconian - that the appropriate level is reference to the primary scientific literature, that references to text books may be reasonable if your interlocutor is new to the field but should be avoided if possible and that the availability of the material should not be a substantial concern. I will endeavour to find online material but I won't refrain from a cogent line of argument simply because not everybody will neccessarily be able to access all the relevant material.I would be interested in anybody's views on this matter.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 05-11-2005 05:47 AM

Thanks for that Mick, its another option certainly. I think that ideally with an online forum like this all the lurkers and other participants in a thread should have the same chance to access stuff, otherwise it is going to get a bit insular if only 2 of you have any idea what you are talking about. But certainly if someone is using the unavailability of full text as a stalling tactic it is one resolution.TTFN,WK